Staff Software Engineer

Staff Software Engineer

Cisco Systems

Krakow, Poland

Your impact

As a Staff Software Engineer within the Foundations organization, you will architect and deliver resilient, high-scale platform solutions that host Splunk's enterprise software across multi-cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure) and on-premises environments. You will balance hands-on distributed systems development with technical leadership-driving architectural decisions, establishing reliability standards, and mentoring engineers to power the next evolution of the Splunk Platform.

• What you'll do
• Design, develop, and maintain Splunk Platform components across multiple cloud providers (AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure) and on-premises infrastructure, focusing on scalable, secure, and maintainable software solutions.
• Oversee and participate in designing, implementing, testing, and deploying of distributed systems.
• Apply software engineering best practices in distributed systems programming, including debugging, performance tuning, and reliability engineering for complex systems like Kubernetes controllers, database platforms, and data replication.
• Define and improve service health indicators, observability, SLOs, RPO/RTO targets, alerting, runbooks, and end-to-end recovery testing.
• Lead incident diagnosis and learning, reducing operational risk and limiting customer impact through resilient design, automation, and recovery practices.
• Mentor and guide junior and mid-level engineers, promoting knowledge sharing and professional growth.
• Turn roadmap items into clear design, system boundaries, APIs, milestones, and engineering decisions.
• Lead design reviews and influence technical direction for the team’s roadmap and projects.
• Foster a culture of continuous learning and adaptability within an agile, fast-paced environment, encouraging innovation and exploration of new technologies.

Minimum Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems or SaaS platform infrastructure.
• Strong proficiency in Go and/or C++ for production systems development, with scripting experience in Python or Bash.
• Proven expertise building Kubernetes-native software (Custom Controllers, Operators) and deploying resilient applications across major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Deep understanding of concurrency, data replication, idempotency, partial failure modes, and eventual consistency.
• Proven track record of leading technical design reviews, author clear RFCs/design docs, and mentor engineering teams.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills in English, with experience collaborating across cross-functional engineering teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands-on experience scaling and running stateful workloads in Kubernetes (PostgreSQL, distributed NoSQL databases, caching layers, or object storage).
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), CI/CD pipelines (GitLab/Jenkins), and service mesh/networking infrastructure (load balancers, API gateways, DNS, TLS).
• Practical knowledge of SRE standards, distributed tracing, alerting frameworks, and chaos/recovery testing.
• Experience driving technical deliverables in fast-paced Agile (Scrum/Kanban) environments.