Staff Software Engineer

The Splunk Metadata Catalog (MDC) team is part of the core Splunk Platform organization building a high-scale Knowledge Graph to enable data asset discovery, relationship mapping, and data lineage tracing. The team is a foundational part of the Cisco Data Fabric strategy.

• Bachelor's in computer science/engineering plus 8 years related experience, or Master's plus 6 years, or PhD plus 3 years.
• Proven experience designing, building, and deploying enterprise-grade distributed systems and cloud-native microservices (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• Advanced proficiency in object-oriented or systems languages such as Go, Java, or C++ with strong debugging and system-level programming skills.
• Strong hands-on experience with containerization and orchestration platforms (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Deep experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing frameworks, and infrastructure-as-code practices in Agile environments.
• Strong mastery of data structures, algorithms, concurrency, system design, and database principles.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with graph databases (Neo4j, AWS Neptune, Apache AGE, ArangoDB) or query languages (Cypher, Gremlin, GraphQL, RDF/SPARQL).
• Background building metadata catalogs, data governance tools, schema registries, or data lineage platforms.
• Familiarity with high-throughput streaming and data processing systems (Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, Apache Spark).
• Experience establishing observability metrics, tracing (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus), and resilience patterns for cloud services.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills to articulate complex technical trade-offs.

Architecture & Design:

• Lead technical design and implementation of scalable features and microservices within the Metadata Catalog and Knowledge Graph platform.

Distributed Systems:

• Design, build, and optimize robust, low-latency, high-throughput services handling large-scale graph relationships and lineage queries.

Engineering Excellence:

• Champion engineering best practices, design reviews, code quality, and Developer Owned Quality mindset.

Leadership & Mentorship:

• Guide, mentor, and coach mid-level and early-career engineers.

Collaboration:

• Partner with Product Managers, Architects, SREs, and engineering teams across Cisco Data Fabric.

Operational Excellence:

• Own production services including observability standards, SLOs/SLAs, performance benchmarks, on-call rotations, and incident reviews.