Senior Software Engineer, Data Engineering

Data Engineer

Cisco Network Platform processes telemetry from more than 25 million devices worldwide, ingesting petabytes of data every day. This data powers critical network experiences, operational insights, and customer-facing capabilities across Cisco's platform.

We're looking for a Data Engineer to help build and operate the large-scale systems that make this possible. You'll work on high-throughput data ingestion, processing, and storage systems that turn raw device telemetry into reliable, useful data products. This is an opportunity to solve distributed-systems challenges at meaningful scale alongside engineers across the organization.

In this role, you will architect and operate scalable data pipelines capable of ingesting petabyte-scale telemetry from over 25 million network devices to drive global operational insights. You will engineer resilient, high-performance distributed systems within Kubernetes environments, directly impacting the availability and reliability of critical network infrastructure. By collaborating across product and engineering teams, you will translate complex data requirements into dependable solutions that empower data-driven decision-making. You will establish robust observability standards using ELK and Grafana to proactively identify issues and streamline system recovery. You will accelerate the entire development lifecycle by integrating AI-assisted engineering tools, ensuring that every deployment meets rigorous standards for security, validation, and design excellence.

Minimum Qualifications

• Experience building, operating, or debugging distributed systems or backend services that process at least 1TB of telemetry data daily.
• Programming experience using Scala, C++, or Java within a production environment.
• Experience designing and managing data pipelines applying streaming or batch processing frameworks such as Kafka, Spark, or Flink.
• Experience deploying and maintaining containerized workloads on Kubernetes clusters in a production environment.
• Experience with Terraform, Ansible, Elasticsearch, or Grafana for automating infrastructure and monitoring workflows.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with real-time streaming or compute technologies such as Kafka, Flink, Spark, or similar platforms.
• Familiarity with network telemetry, networking protocols, or large fleet-management systems.
• Experience with SQL, distributed data stores or operating cloud-native services in production.
• Contributions to open-source projects, personal systems projects, or other evidence of technical curiosity.
• A pragmatic, organized approach to software quality, testing, and operational ownership, with strong problem-solving skills and enthusiasm for working with complex systems at scale.

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.