Leader, Software Engineering

Cisco

6d • Onsite

About The Position

The Splunk Search Experience backend team sits at the core of the Splunk Platform, powering Cisco Data Fabric vision to transform machine data into AI-ready intelligence.
We are seeking an experienced engineering leader to guide a team of passionate distributed systems engineers in building the next-generation, highly scalable search platform that fuels AI-driven workflows across our products.
In this role, you will lead the evolution of Splunk’s flagship search engine capabilities, ensuring the platform meets the next wave of customer scale, performance, and reliability needs. You will partner with engineering, product, and cross-functional teams to deliver high-performance, efficient, and resilient backend search services that delight customers.

Requirements

• Bachelors + 12 years of related experience, or Masters + 8 years of related experience, or equivalent related work experience
• 5+ years of experience building, managing, and leading engineering teams.
• Proven experience leading backend or distributed systems engineering teams.
• Strong expertise in building and scaling large-scale, high-performance systems.
• Deep understanding of search technologies, indexing systems, distributed storage, large-scale data platforms, and information-retrieval systems.
• Demonstrated ability to drive technical strategy, execution, and cross-team collaboration.
• Passion for solving complex systems problems and delivering customer-impacting results.
• Experience with cloud-native technologies and running cloud-based services.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with internal workings of large-scale query engines such as Presto or AWS Athena.

Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing team of backend and distributed-systems engineers.
• Drive the architecture, scalability, and reliability of Splunk’s search backend to support massive data volumes and advanced AI-driven use cases.
• Partner with product and platform teams to define long-term strategy for search services and execution roadmaps.
• Foster a culture of engineering excellence, operational rigor, and customer-centric innovation.
• Own delivery of high-quality, performant backend features and services that power search across the Splunk ecosystem.
• Champion best practices in distributed systems, cloud-native design, reliability engineering, and performance optimization.

Benefits

• 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.
• Employees may be eligible to receive grants of Cisco restricted stock units, which vest following continued employment with Cisco for defined periods of time.
• 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

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level