Distinguished Engineer - Spark Infrastructure Architecture

Distinguished Engineer - Spark Infrastructure Architecture

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Splunk, a Cisco company, is building a safer and more resilient digital world with an end‑to‑end full‑stack platform designed for a hybrid, multi‑cloud environment. Our unified security and observability platform keeps digital systems secure and reliable for leading enterprises.

Our Distinguished Engineer team drives architecture and technical direction for Splunk’s $3.5B platform, ingesting petabytes of data for over 95% of the Fortune 100. The team reports to the VP of Architecture, operates autonomously, and coordinates closely on practical, durable solutions that evolve the platform for future requirements. Each DE owns cross‑organizational domains that shift fluidly as needs arise. Work alongside exceptionally smart engineers who value rigorous thinking and friendly collaboration—this is where the technical future gets defined.

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 organizational sources. Build resilient, always‑on infrastructure with automatic retry logic, fault tolerance, and seamless integration across myriad data sources and formats including 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. Success is measured by customer adoption of data fabric capabilities and operational reliability metrics—uptime, ingestion performance, and incident reduction—directly impacting customer value.

• 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 sponsors, design, product management, and engineering teams.

The starting salary range posted for this position is $ to $ and reflects the projected salary range for new hires in U.S./Canada locations, not including incentive compensation, equity, or 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.
• Restricted stock unit grants, vesting after continued employment.
• 10 paid holidays per calendar year, plus one floating holiday for non‑exempt employees.
• Paid day off for birthday, year‑end holiday shutdown, and 4 paid days off for personal wellness.
• Paid vacation: 16 days for non‑exempt employees, prorated cumulative method; exempt employees have flexible program.
• 80 hours of sick time per year, with carry‑forward.

At Cisco, we’re revolutionizing how data and infrastructure connect and protect organizations in the AI era—and beyond. For 40 years we’ve innovated fearlessly to create solutions that power how humans and technology work together across the physical and digital worlds, providing customers with unparalleled security, visibility, and insights across the entire digital footprint.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and welcome applicants from all backgrounds to apply.