Data Engineering Technical Leader - CX AI
About The Position
Cisco’s Customer Experience (CX) organization builds a unified digital experience for customers and partners through a modern cloud-native platform and emerging AI capabilities. The Data Engineering Technical Leader will serve as the architectural and technical authority for a next-generation cloud-native data platform. This is a hands-on builder and leadership role, owning distributed data pipelines, lakehouse architectures, and backend services end-to-end to support real-time CX analytics and AI-ready data foundations. The role establishes organizational standards for data modeling, streaming, and observability, mentors engineering teams, and aligns technical execution with strategic business priorities. This is a hybrid role requiring onsite work Tuesday through Thursday. The application window is expected to close on December 30, 2026.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree with 8+ years of related experience, or a master’s degree with 6+ years of related experience.
- Experience using Python and SQL for data engineering, automation, and transformation.
- Backend development experience in a language such as Go, Java, Node.js, or Rust.
- Experience designing REST or GraphQL APIs and working with relational databases such as PostgreSQL or MySQL and/or NoSQL databases.
- Experience implementing distributed messaging and streaming systems using Apache Kafka, AWS SQS/SNS, or comparable technologies.
- Experience building and optimizing data platforms using technologies such as Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, AWS Redshift, or similar.
- Experience building, maintaining, and troubleshooting automated CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or similar, as well as containerized deployments.
Nice To Haves
- Expertise in large-scale data ingestion architectures, Change Data Capture (CDC), and multi-source ETL/ELT across APIs, databases, event streams, and object storage such as S3 or GCS.
- Experience structuring semantic models and feature stores for data science, predictive modeling, and generative AI/LLM applications.
- Experience implementing end-to-end data observability, lineage tracking, and monitoring frameworks such as OpenTelemetry, Datadog, or Prometheus.
- Familiarity with AI-assisted development tools such as Copilot or Cursor and AIOps practices.
- Demonstrated technical mentorship, ability to drive architectural consensus across matrixed teams, and ability to translate business goals into engineering roadmaps.
Responsibilities
- Architect, build, and optimize scalable cloud-native backend services and data platforms for high-throughput ingestion, real-time analytics, and downstream AI/ML consumption.
- Design batch and streaming ETL/ELT pipelines, event-driven data flows, Change Data Capture (CDC), and modern lakehouse architectures.
- Establish standards for data modeling, semantic layers, schema governance, distributed tracing, and real-time telemetry and alerting to ensure data integrity and reliability.
- Define high-performance REST or GraphQL API contracts and backend microservices that expose trusted datasets and metrics for self-service reporting and AI applications.
- Drive CI/CD automation and conduct code and design reviews.
- Mentor senior and mid-level data engineers.
- Coordinate technical dependencies across platform, security, and product stakeholders.
Benefits
- Medical insurance
- Dental insurance
- Vision insurance
- 401(k) plan with Cisco matching contribution
- Paid parental leave
- Short- and long-term disability coverage
- Basic life insurance
- Cisco restricted stock unit grants may be available, subject to eligibility and continued-employment vesting requirements
- 10 paid holidays per full calendar year
- One floating holiday for non-exempt employees
- One paid day off for an employee’s birthday
- Paid year-end holiday shutdown
- Four paid personal wellness days
- Non-exempt employees receive 16 days of paid vacation per full calendar year, accrued for full-time employees
- Exempt employees participate in a flexible vacation time-off program with no defined usage limit, subject to availability and business limitations
- 80 hours of sick time off provided on hire and each January 1, with up to 80 unused hours carried forward
- Additional paid time away may be requested for critical or emergency family issues
- Optional 10 paid volunteer days per full calendar year
- Non-sales employees may be eligible for annual bonuses, subject to Cisco policies
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
