Distinguished Engineer - Spark Infrastructure Architecture

Splunk, a Cisco company, is building a safer and more resilient digital world with an end-to-end full stack platform made for a hybrid, multi-cloud world. Leading enterprises use our unified security and observability platform to keep their digital systems secure and reliable. Come help organizations be their best, while you reach new heights with a team that has your back.

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. As a tight-knit group of DEs reporting to the VP of Architecture, we operate autonomously while coordinating 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—that directly impact 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

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, collaborating with empathy to make really big things happen on a global scale. Because our solutions are everywhere, our impact is everywhere.

We are Cisco, and our power starts with you.

The starting salary range posted for this position is $ to $ and reflects the projected salary range for new hires in this position in U.S. and/or Canada locations, not including incentive compensation*, equity, or benefits.

Individual pay is determined by the candidate's hiring location, market conditions, job‑related skillset, experience, qualifications, education, certifications, and/or training. The full salary range for certain locations…