Staff / Sr. Staff Engineer, Data Engineering

Netskope; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 260,000 - 320,000; Full time

Job summary

Netskope seeks an experienced engineering leader to design and operate our AI-native data platform. You will oversee distributed systems spanning edge ingestion, processing, and delivery, focusing on scale, reliability, and low latency.

The role demands deep experience with cloud infrastructure and modern data pipelines, plus mentorship across globally distributed teams. You will help build a semantic layer enabling natural language questions over security telemetry, driving innovative, agentic

Qualifications

• 10+ years building and operating large-scale distributed systems.
• Strong coding ability in one or more of Go, Java, Python, or C++, with production shipping.
• Experience designing for reliability at scale — observability, SLOs, incident response, on cloud infra.
• Demonstrated cross-team technical leadership: influencing architecture decisions.
• Experience building high-throughput ingestion and data services using modern RPCs.
• Experience with high-throughput data pipelines — streaming and batch ingestion.
• Excellent written and verbal communication across time zones.
• Familiarity with LLM-based systems, semantic layers, or data modeling for AI.

Responsibilities

• Partner with architects to design and evolve telemetry systems for global edge ingestion, processing, and delivery.
• Raise the bar on observability, SLOs, deployment safety, and production resilience of the platform.
• Build the AI-native semantic layer enabling natural language data queries.
• Lead cross-team initiatives, shape architecture, and mentor engineers.

Skills

Distributed systems

Go/Java/Python/C++

Cloud platforms

Observability & SLOs

Cross-team leadership

gRPC & Protobuf

Data pipelines

LLM AI interest

Education

BSCS or equivalent

MSCS or equivalent preferred

Tools

AWS/GCP

Kubernetes

Parquet

HTTP/2, gRPC

Job description

About the role

Please note, this team is hiring across all levels and candidates are individually assessed and appropriately leveled based upon their skills and experience.

Netskope's Data Platform is the backbone behind every security insight our customers see, ingesting and processing security telemetry from a global edge network at massive scale. We own the full data path — from collection at the edge, through stream processing and enrichment, to the query, routing, and delivery systems that put that data in customers' hands. On top of that foundation we build the analytics, reporting, and export capabilities that our customers rely on to understand and act on their security posture. We are now investing in an AI-native future, building a semantic layer that makes our data machine-interpretable and agentic experiences that let customers ask questions of their data in natural language.

What you’ll work on

• Partner with architects to design and evolve the systems that carry telemetry from global edge ingestion through processing, query, and customer delivery, with a focus on scale, durability & latency.
• Raise the bar on observability, SLOs, deployment safety, and production resilience of the platform that others build on top of - not just a single service.
• Build the AI-native semantic layer that’s the foundation to make our data machine-interpretable, and the agentic experiences on top of it that let customers ask questions in natural language.
• Lead cross-team initiatives, shaping architecture through design reviews, and mentoring engineers, with the freedom to adopt modern & open source technologies.

Required skills and experience

• 10+ years building and operating large-scale distributed systems, with significant time operating at Staff-level (or equivalent) technical scope.
• Strong coding ability in one or more of Go, Java, Python, or C++, with a track record of shipping production systems, not just designing them.
• Experience designing for reliability at scale — observability, SLOs, incident response, and safe deployment on cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP, Kubernetes).
• Demonstrated cross-team technical leadership: influencing architecture decisions, driving design decisions, and aligning teams around a direction.
• Experience building high-throughput ingestion and data services over modern RPC and wire protocols — HTTP/2, gRPC, and Protocol Buffers — including schema design and evolution.
• Experience with high-throughput data pipelines — data streaming & batch ingestion, processing, and storage using columnar data formats such as Parquet
• Excellent written and verbal communication, and the flexibility to collaborate across time zones with globally distributed teams.
• Ability to ramp up quickly into unfamiliar codebases and domains as priorities evolve, mentoring engineers and raising the engineering bar around you.
• Familiarity with, or strong interest in, LLM-based systems, semantic layers, or data modeling for AI applications.

Education

• BSCS or equivalent required, MSCS or equivalent strongly preferred