IBM
Confluent UK Solutions Engineering Manager
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Introduction
At IBM Global Sales, we bring together innovation, collaboration, and expertise to help clients solve their most complex business challenges. Working across industries and geographies, you’ll partner with colleagues, clients, and partners to co-create solutions that drive digital transformation and lasting impact.
Success in Global Sales is built on curiosity, empathy, and collaboration. You’ll connect technical understanding with strong people skills, building trusted relationships and shaping solutions that improve business and society. With world-class onboarding, continuous learning, and a supportive culture, IBM offers the tools and opportunities to grow your career. Join us and be part of a global team that’s passionate about driving innovation and making a difference.
Your Role And Responsibilities
The UK Solutions Engineering Manager leads our UK Solutions Engineering organisation and plays a critical role in driving customer value, technical success and sustainable consumption growth.
This is a pre-sales leadership role. You will lead, develop and coach a high-performing team of Solution Engineers who work alongside Account Executives to identify customer challenges, create new use cases and workloads, achieve the technical win and ultimately translate those wins into production consumption.
You will work in close partnership with the UK Regional Sales Directors (RSDs), jointly establishing regional priorities, account strategy, resource allocation and the operating rhythm for the business.
Our measure of success goes beyond what we demonstrate, design or sell. It is the customer value and consumption we deliver.
What You'll Do
Lead and develop the UK SE team
- Lead, coach, develop and retain a high-performing team of Solution Engineers.
- Recruit and ramp new talent as the organisation grows.
- Set clear expectations and create a culture of ownership, accountability, collaboration and continuous improvement.
- Coach SEs across the core disciplines of modern pre-sales: discovery, technical qualification, solution design, business value, executive engagement and technical storytelling.
- Develop future leaders and create opportunities for experienced SEs to mentor and contribute beyond their individual accounts.
- Recognise strong performance and address performance or capability gaps early and constructively.
- Provide air cover for the team, removing organisational friction so SEs can maximise the time they spend with customers and creating value.
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Drive pre-sales excellence and consumption
- Own a consistent consumption rhythm across the UK Solutions Engineering organisation.
- Ensure SEs actively identify and develop new workloads and use cases across both new and existing customers.
- Maintain visibility of consumption projects through Scope → Design → Implement → Production, with clear ownership, next steps and outcomes.
- Lead regular project and consumption reviews focused on progression, removing blockers and accelerating workloads into production.
- Understand project conversion, velocity and consumption trends and use this insight to improve execution and forecasting.
- Ensure strong technical qualification and appropriate use of SE resources across opportunities and strategic accounts.
- Coach teams to connect technical capabilities to customer business priorities and measurable outcomes.
- Ensure technical wins don't end at the technical decision, but translate into successful production workloads and sustainable consumption.
Partner with Sales leadership
- Build a strong, trusted partnership with the UK Regional Sales Directors and operate as a joint leadership team for the region.
- Align on regional priorities, strategic accounts, resource allocation and execution.
- Maintain a shared view of where we are winning, where we are blocked and where leadership intervention can accelerate progress.
- Participate actively in account planning, pipeline, deal and consumption reviews, bringing the technical and customer perspective to commercial decision-making.
- Build strong AE/SE partnerships with shared objectives and clear accountability.
- Constructively challenge priorities and decisions where necessary to achieve the best outcomes for customers and the business.
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Lead with customers and across the organisation
- Build trusted relationships with senior technical and business stakeholders across strategic UK customers.
- Act as an executive sponsor and engage directly where leadership involvement can build confidence, create alignment or unblock progress.
- Be credible with audiences ranging from developers and enterprise architects through to CIOs, CTOs and CDOs.
- Bring together expertise from Product, Engineering, Customer Success, Support, IBM and other specialist teams to solve customer challenges.
- Represent the needs of customers and the field across the wider organisation.
- Be an active member of the UK and EMEA leadership community and an ambassador for our culture and values.
Required Technical And Professional Expertise
- Leadership experience in Solutions Engineering, Pre-Sales or enterprise technical sales.
- A strong track record of leading, coaching and developing high-performing pre-sales teams.
- Deep understanding of the enterprise software sales cycle and the role Solutions Engineering plays from discovery and qualification through technical win and production.
- Experience partnering closely with Sales leadership to deliver shared business outcomes.
- Strong commercial awareness and an understanding of how technical activity translates into customer value, revenue and consumption.
- A credible technical background and the ability to coach technical teams and engage confidently with senior customer stakeholders.
- Experience establishing effective operating rhythms and using data to improve execution, prioritisation and accountability.
- Excellent communication, coaching and influencing skills.
- Experience navigating complex organisations and influencing across teams without relying solely on organisational authority.
- A leadership style that combines high expectations with investment in people's development.
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