My name is Kai Waehner, and I live near Erlangen in beautiful Bavaria, Germany. I travel extensively around the world to meet customers, partners, and the tech community. This global interaction allows me to share insights, learn from diverse perspectives, and foster innovation by bridging regional and cultural nuances in technology adoption.
As a Global Field CTO, my role centers around being a trusted advisor and an industry thought leader, bridging the gap between technical innovation and business value. It involves collaborating with customers, partners, and internal teams to ensure customer success and driving strategic adoption of technologies like data streaming. I deliver value by educating diverse audiences—executives, architects, developers—on the practical and strategic benefits of our solutions, tailoring discussions to meet their unique business needs. Additionally, I provide thought leadership through public speaking, writing, and engaging with analysts and media, shaping industry trends and positioning our company as a leader in the space.
Key aspects of the role include supporting customer success through strategic insights, evangelizing innovative use cases, fostering collaboration across global time zones, and representing the company’s vision in public forums. By leveraging my technical and business expertise, I help organizations solve complex challenges, modernize their architectures, and drive meaningful outcomes. The Field CTO role is inherently dynamic, requiring a balance of technical knowledge, communication skills, and adaptability, making it a cornerstone in a software company’s success strategy.
Thought Leadership with Data Streaming, AI/ML (including GenAI) and Cloud Technologies
My current work focuses on data streaming around the open source projects Apache Kafka and Apache Flink to build mission-critical, enabling the development of mission-critical, scalable real-time infrastructures for tech giants, modern internet startups, and traditional enterprises such as banks and telecommunications companies. This is seamlessly integrated with other cutting-edge technology trends, including cloud computing and AI/ML (with a strong emphasis on generative AI), to deliver innovative, future-proof solutions.
Join the data streaming community and stay informed about new blog posts by subscribing to my newsletterand follow me on LinkedIn or X (former Twitter) to stay in touch.
I regularly write about new technologies, articles and conference talks on my blog. From time to time, I also write some code and post it on Github, for instance some implementations of “Real Time Machine Learning with Kafka and TensorFlow“.
I also post on the Confluent Blog regularly.
I feel honored to be a MVB (Most Valuable Blogger) at the JAVALOBBY of DZone.
Many of these articles are also published at the online publishing platform Medium, too.
Job Role: Global Field CTO
As Global Field CTO, I work with customers across the world (Europe, US, Middle East, Asia, Australia), with internal teams (product, engineering, sales, marketing, evangelism), industry analysts and press. Some companies call this role ‘Field CTO’. References: www.kai-waehner.de
TASKS
- Interact with senior executives and technical experts within the Fortune and Global 2000
- Client-facing role explaining strategic and tactical concepts to customers
- Conversations with executives and then switching to a very technical conversation about architectures, solutions, features, roadmap
- Intermediary between customers and product management (in both directions)
- Remain up to date on industry trends to act as an industry thought leader and trusted advisor in internal discussions, customer meetings and public settings
- Share industry experience and deep technical background in technologies like event streaming, middleware, databases, big data / machine learning, Internet of Things / Industrial IoT, legacy integration and migration, and other fields
- Explain design principles for distributed computing architectures, hybrid cloud deployments, cloud-native architectures and microservices
- Support customer success in large enterprise environments, but also help agile business units and innovative start-ups
- Confidently present in front of audiences of all sizes (from 1 to 1000 and more people) to communicate the value proposition of strategic and tactical concepts and architectures for complex enterprise use cases
- Roadmap presentations (in close sync with product management / engineering) to convince customers about the company’s vision and strategy
- Enablement of internal teams
- Deliver tangible content (articles, whitepapers, slides, demos, etc.) to be used by various business units like sales, presales, marketing, partner, developer experience, product management, and others.
- Work with research analysts (Gartner, Forrester, …)
- Serve as external spokesperson
- Support Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A)
CAREER
I am a recognized expert in application integration, data streaming and AI/Machine Learning. I began my career as a vendor-independent consultant and developer before transitioning into roles such as presales specialist, enterprise architect, and technology evangelist for leading software vendors. Today, I serve as Global Field CTO.
In May 2017, I joined Confluent, a Silicon Valley startup focused on delivering innovative solutions around Apache Kafka and the Confluent Platform, enabling hybrid and multi-cloud data streaming infrastructures for global enterprises. Starting with a company of just ~100 people, I played a pivotal role in Confluent’s journey to an IPO in 2021, achieving a remarkable ~$1 billion USD run rate in 2024. As Field CTO, I collaborate with Fortune 2000 companies to support their mission-critical event streaming architectures and drive digital transformation initiatives.
PUBLIC SPEAKING
I am a regular speaker at international conferences such as Devoxx, Kafka Summit, Current, AWS ReInvent and various CIO/CTO events.
CUSTOMER EVENTS
A few impressions from our customer events where we bring together IT Executives, software developers, architects, data engineers, business teams, and partners. The following pictures are from data streaming community events at BMW Group, Daimler Truck and Michelin.
Kai Waehner
