Software Technical Leader

Senior Software Engineer - Cloud Data Ingestion Platform

Remote: Based in Vancouver, BC or Toronto, ON, with office cadence aligned to local Cisco/Splunk policy.

Meet the Team

Cisco's Splunk Data Management organization owns the cloud-native services that help customers bring critical machine data into Splunk reliably, securely, and at scale. Our team builds and operates a hosted data ingestion platform used to connect cloud data sources, manage collection workflows, and deliver high-volume customer data into Splunk. The services are written primarily in Go, run on Kubernetes, and span distributed service architecture, secure data movement, customer onboarding, and operational tooling across many regions. Production ownership includes participation in the team's on-call rotation. We are looking for a hands-on senior engineer who can serve as the team's technical leader: setting architecture, raising engineering quality, mentoring others, and going deep in code and production systems.

Your Impact:

• Technical Leadership for Cloud Data Ingestion: Set technical direction for a hosted data ingestion platform, including service architecture, platform APIs, developer workflows, customer onboarding, and long-term platform evolution.
• Cloud-Native Platform Architecture: Design, build, and evolve Go-based cloud services and platform components on Kubernetes, balancing scale, cost, reliability, and operability.
• Data Integrity & Customer Trust: Drive designs that protect customer data through secure credential handling, reliable processing, failure recovery, and clear operational controls.
• Reliability, Scale & Operations: Own production quality for a multi-region ingestion platform through better observability, capacity planning, on-call participation, incident response, automated testing, and operational guardrails.
• Integration Ecosystem Acceleration: Make it faster and safer for engineering teams to add new data sources through reusable platform patterns, test frameworks, release processes, and readiness standards.
• Cross-Functional Influence: Partner with Product, cloud infrastructure, security, compliance, support, and field teams to turn customer and platform needs into crisp engineering priorities.
• Technical Mentorship: Mentor engineers across levels, lead design and code reviews, model high-quality technical decision-making, and grow the team's distributed systems and production engineering capability.
• Strategic Clarity & Communication: Synthesize platform tradeoffs, risks, and progress into clear communication for engineering leadership, product stakeholders, and partner teams.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelors + 8 years experience, professional software engineering, including ownership of production cloud services or distributed data systems.
• Programming: 3+ years of professional Go/Golang development experience is required, with a record of delivering maintainable production services.
• Scalable Cloud Architecture: Experience designing and building scalable distributed cloud-native architectures for SaaS or data platforms, with attention to throughput, latency, resilience, cost, and operability.
• Distributed Systems: Experience with distributed systems fundamentals such as concurrency, state management, leader election, scheduling, fault tolerance, retries, and eventual consistency.
• Cloud & Kubernetes: Hands-on experience building and operating containerized services on Kubernetes, including CI/CD, observability, security, on-call participation, and production support.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Technical Ownership: Proven ability to drive architecture, execution, and technical decision-making in ambiguous, high-impact areas.
• Project Technical Leadership: Experience leading other engineers to deliver complex, high-impact projects across design, implementation, rollout, and production ownership.
• Splunk Platform Experience: Experience with Splunk Cloud, data onboarding, observability, security analytics, or related enterprise data platforms.
• Cloud Data Platform Experience: Experience with hosted integration platforms, API-based data collection, streaming or batch ingestion workflows, or extensible platform frameworks.
• Communication: Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical decisions to senior leaders and non-specialists.
• Data Ingestion Platforms: Experience with high-volume data ingestion, event processing, streaming systems, queues, or connector frameworks where correctness and reliability are critical.

Cisco may use AI Tools to review candidate-provided details-such as skills, experience, location, and education-to determine how closely candidates match job criteria. AI Tools are intended to guide and support the recruitment team in identifying and prioritizing candidates but are not used in isolation or without human judgment. For more information about Cisco’s use of AI please see the Job Candidate Privacy Statement found here.

Why Cisco?

At Cisco, we’re revolutionizing how data and infrastructure connect and protect organizations in the AI era - and beyond. We’ve been innovating fearlessly for 40 years to create solutions that power how humans and technology work together across the physical and digital worlds. These solutions provide customers with unparalleled security, visibility, and insights across the entire digital footprint.

Fueled by the depth and breadth of our technology, we experiment and create meaningful solutions. Add to that our worldwide network of doers and experts, and you’ll see that the opportunities to grow and build are limitless. We work as a team, collaborating with empathy to make really big things happen on a global scale. Because our solutions are everywhere, our impact is everywhere.

We are Cisco, and our power starts with you.

Message to applicants applying to work in the U.S. and/or Canada:

Individual pay is determined by the candidate's hiring location, market conditions, job-related skillset, experience, qualifications, education, certifications, and/or training. The full salary range for certain locations is listed below. For locations not listed below, the recruiter can share more details about compensation for the role in your location during the hiring process.

U.S. employees are offered benefits, subject to Cisco’s plan eligibility rules, which include medical, dental and vision insurance, a 401(k) plan with a Cisco matching contribution, paid parental leave, short and long-term disability coverage, and basic life insurance. Please see the Cisco careers site to discover more benefits and perks. Employees may be eligible to receive grants of Cisco restricted stock units, which vest following continued employment with Cisco for defined periods of time.

U.S. employees are eligible for paid time away as described below, subject to Cisco’s policies:

• 10 paid holidays per full calendar year, plus 1 floating holiday for non-exempt employees

• 1 paid day off for employee’s birthday, paid year-end holiday shutdown, and 4 paid days off for personal wellness determined by Cisco

• Non-exempt employees** receive 16 days of paid vacation time per full calendar year, accrued at rate of 4.92 hours per pay period for full-time employees

• Exempt employees participate in Cisco’s flexible vacation time off program, which has no defined limit on how much vacation time eligible employees may use (subject to availability and some business limitations)

• 80 hours of sick time off provided on hire date and each January 1st thereafter, and up to 80 hours of unused sick time carried forward from one calendar year to the next

• Additional paid time away may be requested to deal with critical or emergency issues for family members

• Optional 10 paid days per full calendar year to volunteer

For non-sales roles, employees are also eligible to earn annual bonuses subject to Cisco’s policies.

Employees on sales plans earn performance-based incentive pay on top of their base salary, which is split between quota and non-quota components, subject to the applicable Cisco plan. For quota-based incentive pay, Cisco typically pays as follows:

• .75% of incentive target for each 1% of revenue attainment up to 50% of quota;

• 1.5% of incentive target for each 1% of attainment between 50% and 75%;

• 1% of incentive target for each 1% of attainment between 75% and 100%; and

• Once performance exceeds 100% attainment, incentive rates are at or above 1% for each 1% of attainment with no cap on incentive compensation.

For non-quota-based sales performance elements such as strategic sales objectives, Cisco may pay 0% up to 125% of target. Cisco sales plans do not have a minimum threshold of performance for sales incentive compensation to be paid.

The applicable full salary ranges for this position, by specific state, are listed below:

New York City Metro Area:

Non-Metro New York state & Washington state:

* For quota-based sales roles on Cisco’s sales plan, the ranges provided in this posting include base pay and sales target incentive compensation combined.

** Employees in Illinois, whether exempt or non-exempt, will participate in a unique time off program to meet local requirements.