Staff Data Platform Architect - Scale & Performance

Cisco Systems, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 190,000 - 270,000; Full time

Job summary

Cisco Systems, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Data & Scalability Platform in a hybrid arrangement. You will guide multi-quarter technical direction for data stores, streaming, compute, and tooling, shaping platform standards and driving large-scale performance and cost initiatives.

You will mentor engineers, influence product teams, and partner with leadership to balance capabilities with cost, reliability, and scale in a fast-moving AI-enabled data environment.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field.
• 6+ years building/operating data-intensive backend services or platforms (or 3+ years with PhD).
• Experience designing scalable, distributed systems for production.
• Backend languages: Go, Java, Rust, C++, or Python; cloud-native; Kubernetes; public clouds.

Responsibilities

• Define multi-quarter technical roadmap for the data platform (storage, streaming, compute, tooling).
• Lead architecture and evolution of the data plane, including data stores and streaming pipelines.
• Establish platform-wide standards for schema design, migration safety, and data retention.
• Drive capacity, performance modeling, and SLOs for data services.
• Lead scalability initiatives across data stores, streaming, and worker fleets.
• Design cost-efficient telemetry solutions and quota/rate-limit models.
• Mentor engineers and raise engineering standards across teams.
• Collaborate with leadership to influence platform direction and budgets.
• Document technology selections and build-versus-buy analyses.

Skills

Technical leadership

Distributed systems

Go

Java

Python

C++

Kubernetes

AWS/GCP

Data-intensive platforms

System design

Observability/OpenTelemetry

Performance optimization

Cost optimization

Mentoring engineers

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS

Master's degree in CS

PhD in CS

Tools

Kubernetes

PostgreSQL

MySQL

ClickHouse

Kafka

Pulsar

AWS

GCP

Job description

Cisco Systems, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Data & Scalability Platform in a hybrid arrangement. You will guide multi-quarter technical direction for data stores, streaming, compute, and tooling, shaping platform standards and driving large-scale performance and cost initiatives.

You will mentor engineers, influence product teams, and partner with leadership to balance capabilities with cost, reliability, and scale in a fast-moving AI-enabled data environment.