Technical Leader (Remote)

The application window is expected to close on: 11/29/2026 Meet the Team You will join our platform engineering team as a Technical Leader, helping lead the design and development of large-scale data plane systems that power the Splunk data ingestion infrastructure. The team builds high-throughput, fault-tolerant distributed systems that ingest and process observability data, including metrics, logs, and traces, at scale. You will help set technical direction, mentor engineers across multiple teams, and influence architecture decisions from prototype through production.

Architect and lead the development of high-throughput, fault-tolerant distributed systems that ingest and process observability data (metrics, logs, traces) at scale. Define and drive the technical roadmap for platform reliability, scalability, and operational efficiency. Partner with product and engineering leadership to translate business requirements into technically sound, pragmatic designs. Establish best practices and standards for observability and capacity planning, participate in incident response, and lead blameless post-incident reviews. Mentor and level up senior engineers; raise the overall technical bar through design reviews and code reviews. Own systems end-to-end — from design through deployment, monitoring, and post-incident analysis.

Bachelor’s degree or higher in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field with 10+ years of experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production, with strong proficiency in programming languages such as Golang. Experience with modern observability platforms, designing pipelines for logs, metrics, and traces for storage and processing on different backend systems such as Splunk, Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, or similar technologies. Experience designing observability for large systems, not just consuming it. Experience with one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure) at a platform level, including networking, storage, and cost optimization. Experience in full-lifecycle agentic development, with a good understanding of context and harness engineering best practices and a drive to explore the constantly evolving space. Technical leadership experience and cross-functional influence, including experience operating at the Staff or Principal level: driving multi-team technical decisions, producing architecture proposals, mentoring senior engineers, and aligning technical strategy with business goals without requiring formal authority.

Proven track record owning systems that process high-volume data streams, with demonstrated skill in capacity planning, traffic management, SLI/SLO definitions, and incident response at scale. C++ proficiency. Practical experience with container technologies, including Docker/OCI containers and running them at scale in Kubernetes. Experience designing systems with security-first principles. A strong operational mindset: designing for failure, instrumenting systems, participating directly in on-call responsibilities, and owning services/components through operations. Strong written and verbal communication skills. Ability to recognize when to prototype quickly and when to slow down for rigor. Why Cisco?  At 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. Fueled 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,