Distinguished Engineer - Spark Infrastructure Architecture

Distinguished Engineer - Spark Infrastructure Architecture

Splunk, a Cisco company, builds a safer, more resilient digital world with a hybrid, multi‑cloud platform. Join a team that drives the technical future of a $3.5 B platform that ingests petabytes of data for over 95 % of the Fortune 100.

As a Distinguished Engineer, you report to the VP of Architecture and operate autonomously to deliver durable, platform‑wide solutions. You own cross‑organizational domains, collaborate with exceptionally smart engineers, and define the technical future.

• Architect and operationalize Spark at scale as a core component of Cisco Data Fabric, enabling customers to access and analyze exponentially more data across diverse sources.
• Build resilient, always‑on infrastructure with automatic retry logic, fault tolerance, and seamless integration across Parquet, Iceberg, and modern table formats.
• Design the operational backbone—monitoring, observability, error handling, and horizontal scalability—that enables hundreds of engineers to build features confidently on solid foundations.
• Establish architectural patterns and support mechanisms that ensure high availability while maintaining performance at petabyte scale.

• Bachelor’s in Computer Science (or equivalent) with 15+ years of related experience; or Master’s with 12+ years; or PhD with 8+ years or equivalent experience.
• Designed and deployed production Spark deployments at scale in cloud environments.
• Experience with modern data formats including Parquet, Iceberg, and related table/columnar formats.
• Production experience with AWS cloud platform.
• Led technical decisions and architectural direction across engineering organizations of 50+ engineers.

• Production experience with Azure and/or GCP cloud platforms.
• Experience integrating with diverse data platforms such as Snowflake, Pinot, Databricks, Trino, or similar systems.
• Extensive Kubernetes experience in production environments.
• Proven track record mentoring and growing engineers with strong collaboration skills across teams.

Employees are eligible for a comprehensive benefits program that includes medical, dental, vision, 401(k) with Cisco matching, paid parental leave, short‑ and long‑term disability coverage, basic life insurance, and equity awards.

Cisco, Inc. is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran, or protected disability status.