Principal Engineer, Data Services & Data Platform Cisco AI and Software Platform Group

Meet the Team

Cisco’s AI and Software Platform Group is building the next generation of intelligent, cloud-native platforms that power Cisco products, services, and customer experiences. We are seeking a Principal Engineer to lead the architecture and development of foundational data services and data platform capabilities at enterprise scale. This role is ideal for a systems thinker and technical leader who is passionate about building reliable, secure, highly scalable data infrastructure.

You will define platform strategy, solve complex distributed-systems challenges, and guide multiple engineering teams in delivering data products that support analytics, automation, and AI/ML workloads.

Strategic Vision & Engineering Leadership Define and drive the multi-year technical roadmap for data services. Influence engineering strategy, provide architectural guidance to leadership, and represent the organization in technical reviews to ensure alignment across teams. Platform Architecture & Design Design and build highly available, scalable, and resilient data systems. Establish reusable primitives and robust architectural patterns for ingestion, processing, storage, and delivery, supporting everything from batch to real-time event-driven workflows.

Data Governance & Quality Ensure the delivery of trusted, discoverable, and high-quality data. Define standards for data products, schemas, lineage, and contracts to empower analytics, observability, and generative AI applications. Cross-Functional Collaboration & Mentorship Partner with product, security, infrastructure, and AI/ML stakeholders to translate business requirements into durable solutions. Drive technical excellence by resolving complex scaling challenges and mentoring senior engineering staff to raise team standards.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• 15+ years of experience designing and delivering large-scale distributed systems or data platforms.
• Experience in data services, cloud platforms, distributed storage, data processing, and service-oriented architectures.
• Programming experience in one or more languages such as Java, Go, Python, or C++.

• Extensive experience building and scaling multi-tenant SaaS or enterprise data platforms from early-stage design to global production.
• Proficiency with a modern data stack, including Kubernetes, Kafka, Flink, Spark, object storage, lakehouse architectures, and distributed SQL engines.
• Proven ability to support modern AI/ML workloads, including experience with feature stores, vector/unstructured data, model evaluation, and generative AI systems.
• Deep understanding of the data lifecycle, with practical experience implementing robust frameworks for governance, data quality, lineage, cataloging, security, privacy, and regulatory compliance.
• Demonstrated ability to work effectively across geographically distributed teams.
• A strong record of industry influence, which may include contributions to open-source projects, technical publications, patents, or established industry standards.

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…