Data Engineering Technical Leader - CX AI

Cisco•San Jose, CA

6d•$186,900 - $267,700•Hybrid

About The Position

Cisco’s Customer Experience (CX) organization builds a unified digital experience for customers and partners through a cloud-native platform and emerging AI capabilities. The team develops scalable, reliable platforms that support customer outcomes and emphasizes quality, urgency, ownership, and data-driven decision making. 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 leadership role owning distributed data pipelines, lakehouse architectures, and backend services end to end to enable real-time CX analytics and AI-ready data. The role establishes organizational standards for data modeling, streaming, and observability, mentors engineering teams, and aligns technical execution with business priorities.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree and 8+ years of related experience, or a master’s degree and 6+ years of related experience.
Experience with 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, and containerized deployments.

Nice To Haves

Expertise in large-scale data ingestion architectures, 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.
A demonstrated track record of technical mentorship, driving architectural consensus across matrixed teams, and translating 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.
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, dental, and vision insurance.
401(k) plan with Cisco matching contribution.
Paid parental leave.
Short- and long-term disability coverage.
Basic life insurance.
Paid holidays and floating holiday for non-exempt employees.
Paid birthday day off, year-end holiday shutdown, and personal wellness days.
Paid vacation or flexible vacation time off, depending on employee classification.
Sick time off.
Additional paid time away may be requested for critical or emergency family issues.
Optional paid volunteer days.
Annual bonuses may be available for non-sales roles, subject to Cisco policies.
Eligible employees may receive Cisco restricted stock unit grants.