Staff Engineering Product Manager, Analytics - Query Language & Planning (Hybrid) (San Jose)

The application window is expected to close on: 08/28/2026Job posting may be removed earlier if the position is filled or if a sufficient number of applications are received.This position is a hybrid role, requiring the employee to work both onsite and remotely. Candidates should be comfortable with a flexible work arrangement that balances in-office collaboration and remote work. Specific onsite days and remote days will be coordinated with the team and manager.Meet the Team 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. Our customers love our technology, but it's our caring employees that make Splunk stand out as an amazing career destination. No matter where in the world or what level of the organization, we approach our work with kindness. So bring your work experience, problem-solving skills and talent, of course, but also bring your joy, your passion and all the things that make you, you! Come help organizations be their best, while you reach new heights with a team that has your back. Your Impact As a Staff Product Manager in the Analytics area, you will own the long-term vision and product strategy for Splunk’s SPL search language, and how internal and third-party developers build on it. You will lead cross-functional alignment to integrate SPL across products with different execution models, creating a consistent analytical experience for customers across the Splunk portfolio. You will define the query-planning model that translates user intent into execution against Splunk indexes, distributed data stores, and streaming or third-party runtimes. Establish compatibility, versioning, and migration principles that allow the language to evolve without changing the intended behavior of existing customer searches. Drive the product strategy, you will build the language roadmap from direct customer and internal client insight, connecting platform architecture to the workflows users need to complete. Influence partner teams and senior leaders through clear narratives and architecture reviews, resolving technical disagreements and driving a coherent language strategy. This is a deeply technical product role. A successful candidate can engage credibly in architecture discussions, form a clear product position when engineering teams disagree, and explain the decision to product and engineering leadership without losing the technical substance. A strong candidate for this role can independently understand a language and its execution architecture, develop a credible language product position, explain it at multiple levels, and lead its go-to-market and internal rollout across team boundaries. Minimum Qualifications A Bachelor's Degree with a minimum of 8 years of professional experience, including at least 5 years of product management experience with a highly technical platform or developer product. Validated depth in a query language, database engine, compiler, runtime, or developer platform. Experience using SQL or a programming language is not sufficient; you should have crafted how a technical platform or language behaves and evolves. A record of driving technical direction across boundaries, with technical customers or internal developers as a primary customer. This includes building alignment around product and architectural direction. Outstanding verbal and written communication with both technical and executive audiences. For example: you should be able to explain an architecture decision clearly and respond to technical challenges in real time, via strategy documents and technical narratives. Experience handling compatibility for customer-authored content or public developer interfaces, or other direct experience handling developer or customer-impacting migrations. Preferred Qualifications Familiarity with SPL, and the customer content built on top of it. Experience with distributed query engines or orchestration platforms. Background in security analytics or observability products or analytics over metrics, logs, traces, and spans. Experience designing query interfaces for AI agents. Natural curiosity! Why Cisco? 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. Message to applicants applying to work in the U.S. and/or Canada:The starting salary range posted for this position is $171,600.00 to $245,000.00 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 is listed below. For locations not listed below, the recruiter can share more details about compensation for the role in your location during the hiring process.U.S. employees are offered benefits, subject to Cisco’s plan eligibility rules, which include medical, dental and vision insurance, a 401(k) plan with a Cisco matching contribution, paid parental leave, short and long-term disability coverage, and basic life insurance. Please see the Cisco careers site to discover more benefits and perks. Employees may be eligible to receive grants of Cisco restricted stock units, which vest following continued employment with Cisco for defined periods of time.U.S. employees are eligible for paid time away as described below, subject to Cisco’s policies:10 paid holidays per full calendar year, plus 1 floating holiday for non-exempt employees1 paid day off for employee’s birthday, paid year-end holiday shutdown, and 4 paid days off for personal wellness determined by CiscoNon-exempt employees receive 16 days of paid vacation time per full calendar year, accrued at rate of 4.92 hours per pay period for full-time employeesExempt employees participate in Cisco’s flexible vacation time off program, which has no defined limit on how much vacation time eligible employees may use (subject to availability and some business limitations)80 hours of sick time off provided on hire date and each January 1st thereafter, and up to 80 hours of unused sick time carried forward from one calendar year to the nextAdditional paid time away may be requested to deal with critical or emergency issues for family membersOptional 10 paid days per full calendar year to volunteerFor non-sales roles, employees are also eligible to earn annual bonuses subject to Cisco’s policies.Employees on sales plans earn performance-based incentive pay on top of their base salary, which is split between quota and non-quota components, subject to the applicable Cisco plan. For quota-based incentive pay, Cisco typically pays as follows:.75% of incentive target for each 1% of revenue attainment up to 50% of quota;1.5% of incentive target for each 1% of attainment between 50% and 75%;1% of incentive target for each 1% of attainment between 75% and 100%; andOnce performance exceeds 100% attainment, incentive rates are at or above 1% for each 1% of attainment with no cap on incentive compensation.For non-quota-based sales performance elements such as strategic sales objectives, Cisco may pay 0% up to 125% of target. Cisco sales plans do not have a minimum threshold of performance for sales incentive compensation to be paid.The applicable full salary ranges for this position, by specific state, are listed below:New York City Metro Area:$171,600.00 - $281,800.00Non-Metro New York state & Washington state:$151,300.00 - $250,900.00* For quota-based sales roles on Cisco’s sales plan, the ranges provided in this posting include base pay and sales target incentive compensation combined. Employees in Illinois, whether exempt or non-exempt, will participate in a unique time off program to meet local requirements.Job SummaryJob number: 2020842Date posted : 2026-08-09Profession: Product and EngineeringEmployment type: Full time