Senior Software Engineer

Overview

Meet The Team. Splunk’s mission is to build a safer, more resilient digital world. Leading enterprises rely on our unified security and observability platform to keep systems secure, reliable, and performing at their best. While customers love our technology, it’s our people who truly make Splunk a top career destination, reflected in our many “Best Place to Work” awards. If you become a Splunker, we want your whole, authentic self—what we call your “million data points.”

Bring your experience, problem solving skills, and talent, plus your energy, passion, and all the unique qualities that make you, you.

Our Observability Platform Team comprises highly skilled engineers who work on the core data platform that powers Splunk’s observability products. We deliver a scalable data foundation that enables teams across Splunk to build the observability features our customers depend on. We operate in small, high impact teams that tackle data on a massive scale.

• Build and optimize petabyte scale ingestion and storage for telemetry data such as Metrics, Traces, and Events.
• Lead the design of real-time analytics and low latency querying for both streaming and batch workflows.
• Drive modernization initiatives and set the technical vision for the platform.
• Establish technical direction for handling high cardinality, high dimensionality, and massive data volumes.
• Develop and enforce system-wide architecture principles: scalability, resilience, security, cost-efficiency, and performance.

As a Senior Staff Software Engineer, you will architect and build real-time, high-throughput data processing systems that ingest and analyze billions of metrics per minute. You will define the technical strategy for our next-generation observability platform, ensuring it continues to scale, perform, and evolve with customer and AI-driven demands. Partnering closely with product management and engineering teams across Splunk, you will deliver core capabilities that prioritize scalability, reliability, and low-latency performance.

Your work will directly shape how customers monitor and operate mission-critical systems worldwide. You will continually drive innovation by evaluating emerging technologies and introducing forward-looking improvements to the platform.

• Design and deliver high-performance streaming ingestion and query services that serve as the data foundation for Splunk’s advanced analytics and observability capabilities.
• Build, deploy, and operate core ingestion, storage, and query components using Git Lab, Kubernetes, and AI-driven tooling to accelerate development and improve operational efficiency.
• Proactively monitor, optimize, and troubleshoot complex distributed systems in real time, applying deep performance-profiling expertise to ensure platform resilience and reliability.
• Research, evaluate, and integrate emerging technologies, AI frameworks, and open-source solutions to advance the team’s technical stack and the platform’s scalability and performance.
• Partner closely with product managers to define feature requirements, guide technical execution, and ensure high-quality, predictable delivery across teams.
• Support production systems by diagnosing and resolving difficult escalations quickly, minimizing customer impact, and maintaining service continuity.

• At least 6 months of experience effectively using LLM based coding assistant tools, with a strong AI first mindset.
• 3+ years architecting and delivering large scale, distributed SaaS solutions.
• Deep knowledge of microservices and distributed application architectures and understanding when simplification is the better path.
• Strong problem solving and communication skills, able to simplify complex technical concepts for any audience.
• Proficient in Java, with a track record of quickly learning new languages.

• BS in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field plus 12+ years of experience, OR
• MS with 10+ years' experience, OR
• PhD with 5+ years' experience.

• Deep domain knowledge in observability and monitoring.
• Robust troubleshooting, profiling, and performance…