Principal Software Engineer

Meet The Team

Splunk's Platform Engineering team is evolving the core platform to run reliably on Kubernetes across cloud and customer-managed environments. The team builds the runtime foundations, orchestration patterns, lifecycle capabilities, and platform services that enable Splunk products to move faster on a common cloud-native substrate. We are a senior, systems-oriented group working across core engineering, product, security, operations, and customer-facing teams. Our work is complex, high-impact, and central to Splunk's FY27 priorities around Kubernetes adoption, cloud growth, customer-managed platform parity, and future innovation. This is an opportunity to help shape how a large-scale enterprise platform modernizes while preserving the reliability and compatibility customers depend on.

Your Impact

Lead technical direction for Kubernetes-based platform architecture that makes Splunk easier to deploy, operate, upgrade, diagnose, and evolve. Translate complex product, customer, and feature-team requirements into practical designs, engineering contracts, and implementation plans. Partner across core runtime, Kubernetes operator, configuration, application platform, search, security, cloud, and product teams to align execution around reusable architecture. Identify cross-component dependencies, failure modes, lifecycle gaps, and migration risks before they become release or customer-impacting issues. Drive incremental modernization of a mature enterprise platform while preserving customer trust, compatibility, and operational quality.

Minimum Qualifications

Bachelors + 15 years of related experience, or Masters + 12 years of related experience, or PhD + 8 years of related experience, or equivalent related work experience

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience building backend, platform, infrastructure, or distributed systems.
• 5+ years of experience designing, building, or operating production distributed systems.
• 2+ years of hands-on Kubernetes experience, including workload orchestration, operators/controllers, or cloud-native deployment patterns.

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior experience designing production APIs, lifecycle orchestration, configuration systems, upgrade systems, or platform services.
• Applied experience with at least one backend/platform programming language such as Go, C++, Java, Python.
• Prior experience with Kubernetes operators, control planes, developer platforms, infrastructure automation, or large-scale platform services.
• Prior experience modernizing legacy or monolithic enterprise systems toward cloud-native operating models.
• Applied experience with enterprise customer commitments, regulated environments, cloud/on-prem deployment variance, and long-lived compatibility expectations.
• Previous background with the ability to synthesize ambiguous cross-team requirements into clear technical direction, tradeoffs, and execution plans.
• Applied experience using AI-assisted engineering tools responsibly for code comprehension, review preparation, test planning, incident triage, documentation, or migration analysis.