Associate Technical Support Engineer - Confluent

IBM
IBM

IT, Customer Service

United Kingdom · Hursley, UK

Posted on Jul 23, 2026
Introduction

At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world’s leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You’ll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM’s product and technology landscape. Here, you’ll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world.

Your role and responsibilities

About the Role At Confluent, our mission is to help organizations unlock the full value of their data through real-time data streaming. Our platform powers some of the world's most critical applications, enabling businesses to make faster decisions, deliver better customer experiences, and build modern data-driven systems. As an Associate Technical Support Engineer, you'll join our EMEA Technical Support team and work alongside customers, Engineering, Product Management and Professional Services to resolve complex technical challenges. This is not a traditional support role. You'll investigate distributed systems, analyse production issues, and help customers successfully operate mission-critical Kafka environments while developing deep expertise in streaming technologies.

What You'll Do In this role you will: ● Investigate and resolve technical issues across Confluent Platform and Confluent Cloud deployments. ● Work directly with enterprise customers to diagnose problems, explain findings, and guide successful resolutions. ● Collaborate closely with Engineering to identify product defects, validate fixes, and provide customer-driven feedback. ● Analyse logs, metrics, thread dumps, configuration and runtime behaviour to troubleshoot complex distributed systems. ● Improve customer and internal knowledge by contributing documentation, troubleshooting guides and knowledge base articles. ● Contribute to internal tooling and automation that improve support efficiency and customer experience. ● Participate in continuous improvement initiatives that enhance our support processes, tooling and operational excellence.

Required education
None
Preferred education
None
Required technical and professional expertise

● At least two years' recent experience in software development, technical support, site reliability engineering or a similar technical role. ● Experience working with distributed systems, databases, messaging systems or data pipelines. ● Ability to read and understand Java code for troubleshooting purposes. ● Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with a structured approach to technical investigations. ● Experience diagnosing technical issues in Linux environments using logs, command-line tools and system utilities. ● Strong written and verbal communication skills with the ability to explain complex technical concepts clearly. ● A genuine passion for learning new technologies and developing expertise in distributed streaming platforms. ● A customer-first mindset with a desire to deliver outstanding technical support.

Preferred technical and professional experience

● Apache Kafka or other distributed messaging technologies. ● Java development. ● Public cloud platforms (AWS, Azure or Google Cloud). ● Kubernetes, Docker or containerised environments. ● Linux system administration. ● Networking fundamentals (DNS, TLS, load balancing, firewalls). ● CI/CD pipelines and software development lifecycle practices. ● SQL, data analysis or scripting (Python, Bash or similar). ● Observability platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana or OpenTelemetry. ● Experience using AI-assisted tools to improve troubleshooting, automation and knowledge management.

ABOUT BUSINESS UNIT

IBM Software infuses core business operations with intelligence—from machine learning to generative AI—to help make organizations more responsive, productive, and resilient. IBM Software helps clients put AI into action now to create real value with trust, speed, and confidence across digital labor, IT automation, application modernization, security, and sustainability. Critical to this is the ability to make use of all data, because AI is only as good as the data that fuels it. In most organizations data is spread across multiple clouds, on premises, in private datacenters, and at the edge. IBM’s AI and data platform scales and accelerates the impact of AI with trusted data, and provides leading capabilities to train, tune and deploy AI across business. IBM’s hybrid cloud platform is one of the most comprehensive and consistent approach to development, security, and operations across hybrid environments—a flexible foundation for leveraging data, wherever it resides, to extend AI deep into a business.

YOUR LIFE @ IBM

In a world where technology never stands still, we understand that, dedication to our clients success, innovation that matters, and trust and personal responsibility in all our relationships, lives in what we do as IBMers as we strive to be the catalyst that makes the world work better.

Being an IBMer means you’ll be able to learn and develop yourself and your career, you’ll be encouraged to be courageous and experiment everyday, all whilst having continuous trust and support in an environment where everyone can thrive whatever their personal or professional background.

Our IBMers are growth minded, always staying curious, open to feedback and learning new information and skills to constantly transform themselves and our company. They are trusted to provide on-going feedback to help other IBMers grow, as well as collaborate with colleagues keeping in mind a team focused approach to include different perspectives to drive exceptional outcomes for our customers. The courage our IBMers have to make critical decisions everyday is essential to IBM becoming the catalyst for progress, always embracing challenges with resources they have to hand, a can-do attitude and always striving for an outcome focused approach within everything that they do.

Are you ready to be an IBMer?

ABOUT IBM

IBM’s greatest invention is the IBMer. We believe that through the application of intelligence, reason and science, we can improve business, society and the human condition, bringing the power of an open hybrid cloud and AI strategy to life for our clients and partners around the world.

Restlessly reinventing since 1911, we are not only one of the largest corporate organizations in the world, we’re also one of the biggest technology and consulting employers, with many of the Fortune 500 companies relying on the IBM Cloud to run their business.

At IBM, we pride ourselves on being an early adopter of artificial intelligence, quantum computing and blockchain. Now it’s time for you to join us on our journey to being a responsible technology innovator and a force for good in the world.

IBM is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, or other characteristics protected by the applicable law. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.

OTHER RELEVANT JOB DETAILS

For additional information about location requirements, please discuss with the recruiter following submission of your application.

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