Meet Sharmey Shah, Our Confluent Champion for AAPI Heritage Month

Meet Sharmey Shah—Area Vice President of the Northeast region in North America. Having joined the Enterprise Sales organization over a year ago, Sharmey has helped revitalize customer experience in innovative ways.

Let’s learn more about Sharmey and hear about her passion for effective collaboration and driving exceptional customer engagement.

Tell us about your path to Confluent and what got you here. What role do you and your team play in the company?

Around 15 months ago, my passion to get back toward open-source innovation led me to Confluent. My interest in this area was ignited during my time with Red Hat where I first experienced how Apache Kafka® was an up-and-coming disruptor. 

Here at Confluent, I’m the Area Vice President of Enterprise Sales for our Americas Northeast and my team consists of some of the best Account Executives and Sales Directors in the industry.

Tell us about an interesting project that you are currently working on. What does a typical day look like as a Confluent Area Vice President?

I get to experience different parts of Confluent through leading my area with the operational responsibilities of running the Northeast. Every day, I collaborate with different parts of the organization to increase our customer engagement and represent Confluent at various industry and customer events and engagements.

The most fulfilling part of my role is that every day is different, but I truly love engaging with our customers. The energy that I get from seeing clients is second to none. 

This year, my area became the first among our enterprise sales teams to embrace an industry segmentation model. Our guiding principles around this initiative are to empower regions to surprise and delight our customers with increased relevance of Confluent solutions toward their business.

How would you describe Confluent’s company culture?

Confluent is a highly collaborative environment that welcomes participation. It’s an engaging culture that embraces employees to be impactful and influential.

The environment in which my team operates in Sales allows us to experience every part of the organization: 

• Working with customers to tell their stories with our marketing team

• Collaborating with product management and engineering on near-term use cases and corresponding roadmap

• Teaming with Legal to accelerate our clients’ journey toward real-time data flows and processing

These are just a few examples of the collaboration we get to experience every day on my team. 

What made you interested in working here? What was the deciding factor?

Confluent’s inspiring senior leadership team is what drew me to explore the idea of joining the company. Since my start date, I’ve discovered that the initial spark of inspiration and energy I felt truly permeates the company and challenges me to bring my best self to work daily.

What’s one thing you would want to see Confluent do differently?

Confluent is on a mission to change the way our customers think about streaming data pipelines. We have a huge opportunity to humanize this technology to inspire and help reimagine their business. 

For example, when I made the decision to come to Confluent, no one in my family had any idea what Kafka was. I explained how Instacart, a staple in our lives during the pandemic, used our technology for real-time inventory availability with extreme scalability. Their non-technology brain could visualize how Confluent could change the very way we think about grocery shopping and well…the rest is history.