{"id":2888313,"url":"https://alion.io/job/cisco-systems-staff-software-engineer-data-scalability-platform","title":"Staff Software Engineer, Data & Scalability Platform","company":{"id":90,"name":"Cisco Systems","domain":"cisco.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/cisco-systems","size_band":"5000+","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Workday","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":84,"open_postings":194,"ghost_share":0.015,"stale_share":0.552,"repost_share":0.057,"time_to_fill_p50_days":25,"computed_at":"2026-10-20T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States","San Jose, United States","New York, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":186900,"max":307800,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":307800},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"GCP","optional":false},{"name":"Go","optional":false},{"name":"Java","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Rust","optional":false},{"name":"Splunk","optional":false},{"name":"Amazon Kinesis","optional":true},{"name":"Apache Kafka","optional":true},{"name":"BigQuery","optional":true},{"name":"Celery","optional":true},{"name":"ClickHouse","optional":true},{"name":"FinOps","optional":true},{"name":"Flink","optional":true},{"name":"GDPR","optional":true},{"name":"Google BigQuery","optional":true},{"name":"Grafana","optional":true},{"name":"MySQL","optional":true},{"name":"OpenTelemetry","optional":true},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":true},{"name":"Presto","optional":true},{"name":"Pyroscope","optional":true},{"name":"RabbitMQ","optional":true},{"name":"Snowflake","optional":true},{"name":"Spark","optional":true},{"name":"Time Series Forecasting","optional":true},{"name":"Trino","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-16T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-16","last_verified_at":"2026-10-20T19:38:26Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":4,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":4},"description":"The application window is expected to close on: 10/31/2026This is a Hybrid position requiring Tuesdays and Thursdays on-site. In CA, the on-site requirement is Tuesdays in San Francisco and Thursdays in San Jose, CA; in NYC, Tuesdays and Thursdays are on-site in our NYC office. \nThe Splunk Agent Resilience team is defining the future of AI resilience. Our team provides scalable, cost-effective evaluation and guardrails that ensure AI agents behave as intended, improving reliability and reducing risks. This unified approach empowers our customers to confidently deploy and run AI-powered applications with enhanced observability and control.\nAs a Staff Software Engineer on the Data & Scalability Platform team, you will provide technical leadership for the architecture, scalability, and cost of the entire data plane: the stores that hold the data, the streaming and compute components that move and transform it, and tooling proving how all of it behaves under load. You will define the multi-quarter, technical direction for that data plane, establish the standards other teams build against, own the initiatives that keep it fast and correct as it grows by orders of magnitude, and influence the technical direction of the platform with engineering team leadership and product teams.\nYour Impact\nDefine and drive the multi-quarter technical roadmap for the data platform - storage, streaming, compute, and the tooling that measures them.\nLead the architecture and evolution of the data plane, including storage engine selection, sharding and tenancy models, and control/data plane boundaries.\nEstablish platform-wide standards for schema design, migration safety, retention of data, and lead the review process that enforces them.\nLead the capacity and performance model, and define the SLOs that set the definition of what correct and fast mean.\nLead major scalability and performance initiatives spanning data stores, streaming pipelines, and distributed worker fleets.\nDrive cost efficiency, the cost per unit of telemetry, cost attribution, and quota and rate-limit design.\nSet the direction for multi-tenant isolation so that no tenant can degrade another.\nDesign and build the internal frameworks and performance tooling - load testing, profiling, and benchmarking - that other engineers rely on to support design and capacity decisions.\nEstablish observability standards for the platform so signals are correct, complete, and affordable.\nLead the most production investigations and drive systemic remediation rather than point fixes.\nMake and document technology-selection and build-versus-buy decisions, with explicit cost, risk, and migration analysis.\nPartner with engineering leadership to influence platform direction and investment, and represent the data platform to the product teams building on it.\nMentor engineers and raise the engineering bar through design reviews, technical standards, and documentation.\nMinimum Qualifications\nBachelor's degree with 8+ years of related experience, or Master's degree with 6+ years, or PhD with 3+ years, in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field - including at least 6 years building and/or operating data-intensive backend services and/or platforms.\nTechnical leadership experience, including experience setting technical direction, driving multi-quarter initiatives, and/or influencing decisions beyond your immediate scope.\nExperience with designing, operating, and/or delivering highly scalable, reliable, production-grade data-intensive platforms. Experience designing large-scale distributed systems and solving problems of scalability, availability, performance, reliability, and/or fault tolerance.\nBackend software engineering experience with either Go, Java, Rust, C++, and/or Python. Experience with cloud-native technologies, containerized environments (Kubernetes), and public cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or similar)\nPreferred Qualifications\nDemonstrated performance engineering ability - profiling, benchmarking, and load testing real systems, and turning the measurements into capacity, design, and cost decisions.\nExperience operating and tuning both an OLTP database (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL) and an analytical, columnar, or time-series store (e.g., ClickHouse, Druid, BigQuery, Snowflake) at production grade at scale - schema design, indexing, query tuning, and migration safety.\nDeep production experience with streaming or queueing systems (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ, Pulsar, Kinesis) - partitioning, consumer-group semantics, delivery guarantees, and backlog and dead-letter handling.\nExperience scaling data-processing compute - queue consumers, async task workers, or streaming jobs - including concurrency tuning, batching, backpressure, and throughput behavior under sustained load.\nDeep experience running ClickHouse or a comparable columnar store at scale - sharding and replication topology, materialized views, merge and mutation behavior, retention and TTL mechanics.\nExperience with a capacity model or a FinOps practice at platform scope: cost per.unit of telemetry, cardinality governance, and quota or rate-limit design.\nExperience designing multi-tenant isolation and noisy-neighbor mitigation in shared data systems.\nExperience leading a significant data migration or storage-engine transition in production without customer-visible impact.\nExperience defining SLOs for data services and driving an organization to meet them.\nExperience with backup and restore, tested disaster-recovery drills against stated RPO/RTO, and data retention or deletion compliance (e.g., GDPR/DSR hard delete).\nExperience building observability instrumentation and pipelines (OpenTelemetry, collectors, metrics/tracing backends) rather than only consuming dashboards.\nExperience building or operating performance tooling as a product for other engineers - the load-test harnesses, continuous profiling and flame-graph workflows (e.g., Pyroscope), or benchmarking suites.\nExperience with distributed task frameworks and worker orchestration (e.g., Celery, Temporal, Flink, custom consumer fleets) at production scale.\nFamiliarity with streaming databases, stream processing frameworks, or distributed query engines (e.g., RisingWave, Flink, Spark Streaming, Trino/Presto) and with model-serving infrastructure.\nExperience supporting stateful systems in both cloud/SaaS and air-gapped or on-prem deployments.\nExperience mentoring senior engineers and raising engineering standards across multiple teams. Strong communication with the ability to turn performance, capacity, and cost findings into clear recommendations for engineering leadership, and product partners.\nWhy Cisco?\nAt 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.\nFueled 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.\nWe are Cisco, and our power starts with you.\nMessage to applicants applying to work in the U.S. and/or Canada:\nThe starting salary range posted for this position is $186,900.00 to $267,700.00 and reflects the projected salary range for new hires in this position in U.S. and/or Canada locations, not including incentive compensation*, equity, or benefits.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.\nU.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.\nU.S. employees are eligible for paid time away as described below, subject to Cisco’s policies:\n10 paid holidays per full calendar year, plus 1 floating holiday for non-exempt employees\n\n1 paid day off for employee’s birthday, paid year-end holiday shutdown, and 4 paid days off for personal wellness determined by Cisco\n\nNon-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\n\nExempt 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)\n\n80 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\n\nAdditional paid time away may be requested to deal with critical or emergency issues for family members\n\nOptional 10 paid days per full calendar year to volunteer\n\nFor non-sales roles, employees are also eligible to earn annual bonuses subject to Cisco’s policies.\nEmployees 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:\n.75% of incentive target for each 1% of revenue attainment up to 50% of quota;\n\n1.5% of incentive target for each 1% of attainment between 50% and 75%;\n\n1% of incentive target for each 1% of attainment between 75% and 100%; and\n\nOnce performance exceeds 100% attainment, incentive rates are at or above 1% for each 1% of attainment with no cap on incentive compensation.\n\nFor 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.\nThe applicable full salary ranges for this position, by specific state, are listed below:\nNew York City Metro Area:\n$186,900.00 - $307,800.00Non-Metro New York state & Washington state:\n$166,300.00 - $274,100.00* 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.\n** Employees in Illinois, whether exempt or non-exempt, will participate in a unique time off program to meet local requirements.","description_format":"text","description_chars":11178,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":8,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Annual bonuses","Equity","Life insurance","Parental leave","Restricted stock units","Vision insurance"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Network Security","Unified Communications","Endpoint Security","Observability & APM"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-20T00:59:40Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 1,384 · green card filings: 608","filings_12m":1384,"filings_prev_12m":1364,"green_card_filings_12m":608,"median_offered_wage_usd":152500,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-15T11:24:14+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)","US Department of Labor: PERM disclosure data (green cards)"],"filings_for_role_12m":747}],"liveness":{"score":63,"band":"ok","label":"Likely open","p_open":1,"p_active":0.626,"p_room":1,"age_days":4,"expected_fill_days":25,"reasons":["conf:3","stale_co","velocity","win:early","comp:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-10-20T05:45:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":307800,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/cisco-systems-staff-software-engineer-data-scalability-platform","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/cisco-systems-staff-software-engineer-data-scalability-platform.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-20T20:24:05Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":23603,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-21T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":90},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=90"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fcisco-systems-staff-software-engineer-data-scalability-platform"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fcisco-systems-staff-software-engineer-data-scalability-platform"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fcisco-systems-staff-software-engineer-data-scalability-platform"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/cisco-systems-staff-software-engineer-data-scalability-platform\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fcisco-systems-staff-software-engineer-data-scalability-platform"}]}