Senior Data Engineer, Network Platform

Cisco • San Francisco, CA

1d

About The Position

Cisco’s Network Platform Data Science team turns customer and network data into smarter decisions, improved customer experiences, and faster innovation. The team works across Engineering, Product, Security, UX, Finance, Licensing, and other functions to deliver reliable, governed data platforms and products that can be used accurately by AI. The environment operates at massive scale, with more than 10 PB of data across more than 30 systems, and emphasizes both rigorous data engineering and trusted data context.

The Senior Data Engineer will set technical direction for reliable, scalable batch and streaming pipelines and data products spanning structured and unstructured data. The role defines and continually improves expectations for data quality, freshness, availability, observability, recovery, and cost, and leads production incident investigations to deliver lasting fixes.

The position will build and evolve a trusted, machine-readable data context layer that covers business definitions, metric semantics, ownership, lineage, quality and freshness, and governed access, integrated with existing catalog and governance systems. It will also apply AI and agentic workflows to bounded data engineering tasks such as pipeline development, validation, and bug triage, evaluating results and using bounded permissions and human review for actions that change production. The goal is a trusted, scalable, observable, and recoverable data foundation that reduces definition drift and helps teams and AI applications use data accurately and confidently.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree and 7 years of related experience, or a master’s degree and 3 years of related experience, or a Ph.D. and 1 year of related experience.
• 5+ years of advanced SQL experience, including data modeling, complex transformations, and query performance tuning.
• 5+ years of Python experience building production data pipelines or services with automated testing and maintainable code.
• 3+ years of experience building, optimizing, and operating production data workloads with Snowflake.
• Experience with distributed processing and orchestration, such as Spark and Airflow or Glue, or equivalent.
• Engineering practices across CI/CD, access controls, data quality, observability, incident response, or cost management.

Nice To Haves

• Postgres experience.
• Experience building trusted data context layers involving metric semantics, lineage, quality and freshness ownership, and governed access integrated with catalog or governance systems.
• Experience applying AI tools or agents to scoped data engineering work such as pipeline validation or bug triage, including evaluating outputs, grounding them in trusted context, and managing data access and operational risk.
• Demonstrated ability to influence architecture across teams and communicate trade-offs while mentoring engineers and growing technical capability.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction for reliable, scalable batch and streaming pipelines and data products across structured and unstructured data.
• Define and continuously improve expectations for data quality, freshness, availability, observability, recovery, and cost.
• Lead production incident investigations and deliver lasting fixes.
• Build and evolve a trusted, machine-readable data context layer covering business definitions, metric semantics, ownership, lineage, quality and freshness, and governed access.
• Integrate the data context layer with existing catalog and governance systems.
• Apply AI and agentic workflows to scoped data engineering needs, including pipeline development, validation, and bug triage.
• Evaluate AI and agentic workflow results and manage production-changing actions through bounded permissions and human review.
• Influence architecture across teams, communicate trade-offs, and mentor engineers.

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
• Paid holidays
• Floating holiday for non-exempt employees
• Paid day off for employee’s birthday
• Paid year-end holiday shutdown
• Paid personal wellness days
• Paid vacation time for non-exempt employees
• Flexible vacation time off program for eligible exempt employees
• Paid sick time
• Additional paid time away may be requested for critical or emergency family issues
• Optional paid volunteer days
• Annual bonuses for eligible non-sales roles
• Potential grants of Cisco restricted stock units

What This Job Offers

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