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Principal Software Engineer (Hybrid Remote - San Jose, CA)

Meet the Team

Join us as we pursue our mission to make machine data accessible, usable, and valuable to everyone. At Cisco, we’re passionate about empowering our customers through reliable, scalable, and secure infrastructure. Our people thrive on innovation, collaboration, and a shared drive to deliver outstanding experiences. We're committed to our work, to our customers, and most importantly—to each other’s success.

Are you passionate about building robust, scalable software systems that drive real product impact? Do you thrive at the intersection of engineering and product—architecting secure, distributed platforms while collaborating closely with cross-functional teams to shape feature direction and technical strategy? If so, a role on our Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) team could be the perfect fit—offering the opportunity to take ownership of critical systems, influence the product roadmap, and deliver intelligent automation capabilities that transform how security teams respond to emerging threats.

Your Impact

As a **Principal Software Engineer** , you will lead the design and implementation of robust, reusable software frameworks that enhance code quality, scalability, and maintainability across the engineering organization. You’ll take ownership of driving engineering excellence through thoughtful architecture, clean abstractions, and best-in-class development practices.

You’ll build systems that validate the behavior of complex, cloud-native applications, applying principles from distributed systems, algorithms, and software design to ensure correctness and performance. Your contributions will elevate developer experience, accelerate innovation, and strengthen the foundation of our software platforms.

What You’ll Do

+ Lead the design, coding and delivery of robust software systems that support rapid, secure, and high-quality product delivery across the full software development lifecycle

+ Drive the development of scalable security automation features within the SOAR platform, enabling intelligent threat detection, response, and remediation capabilities

+ Collaborate with product, QA, and engineering teams to define test strategies and integrate comprehensive test coverage—including unit, integration, performance, and security testing—into the development workflow

+ Contribute to system architecture by designing maintainable backend services and reusable libraries that support cloud-native and on-prem deployments

+ Develop observability features such as logging, metrics collection, and application-level alerts to monitor product health and performance across environments

+ Provide technical leadership in supporting the availability and stability of the SOAR platform, participating in issue triage and resolution across releases

+ Mentor engineers on system design, clean code practices, code reviews, secure development, and test automation, supporting a high-performing engineering culture

+ Stay up to date with emerging tools, technologies, and best practices in software engineering, security automation, and continuous improvement

+ Partner closely with product managers and cross-functional stakeholders to ensure engineering solutions align with product goals, scale effectively, and evolve with user needs

Basic Qualifications

+ Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, with 8–10+ years of experience in software engineering, test automation, and end-to-end product development

+ Rockstar programming skills in Python, C++, Go, or similar languages, with an emphasis on building clean, scalable, and maintainable code for production SAAS and on-prem product lines.

+ Deep expertise in leveraging test frameworks (e.g., Pytest, JUnit, Selenium, Robot Framework, Cypress) to validate microservices, APIs, and complex distributed systems

+ Experience designing containerized development and test environments (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes) to enable faster, more reliable software delivery and ensure consistent user experiences across environments.

+ Proficient in continuous integration tools (e.g., GitLab CI) and version control systems (e.g., Git), with hands-on experience in automating builds, tests, and releases

+ Knowledge of infrastructure provisioning tools (e.g., Terraform, Puppet, Ansible, CloudFormation) in the context of supporting product development and testing automation

+ Strong background in working with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), especially in setting up and optimizing dev/test environments and using platform-native tools to enhance engineering workflows

Preferred Qualifications

+ 10+ years experience architecting, designing, coding and delivering large-scale, distributed systems with a focus on performance, scalability, maintainability, and fault tolerance across the full software development lifecycle

+ 10+ years proven ability to define and own technical direction and drive engineering execution across multiple product lines or platform components, contributing to long-term continuous product improvement and codebase quality

+ 10+ years of expertise in monitoring software health and performance using observability tools such as SignalFX, Grafana, Prometheus, Splunk, or New Relic to improve system reliability and guide development priorities

+ 10+ years of active collaboration with product managers, designers, and cross-functional stakeholders to translate product goals into thoughtful technical solutions that improve user experience and system capabilities

Splunk, a Cisco company, is an Equal Opportunity Employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, genetic information, age, disability, veteran status, or any other legally protected basis.

As part of Cisco's integration of Splunk and our ongoing job mapping process, the title and pay range for this position was updated on June 5th. This change reflects our commitment to aligning roles across the organization while ensuring consistency and clarity. The responsibilities and expectations for this role remain unchanged.

Base Pay Range: $198,600 - 282,900

When available, the salary range posted for this position reflects the projected hiring range for new hire, full-time salaries in U.S. and/or Canada locations, not including equity or benefits. For non-sales roles the hiring ranges reflect base salary only; employees are also eligible to receive annual bonuses. Hiring ranges for sales positions include base and incentive compensation target. Individual pay is determined by the candidate's hiring location and additional factors, including but not limited to skillset, experience, and relevant education, certifications, or training. Applicants may not be eligible for the full salary range based on their U.S. or Canada hiring location. The recruiter can share more details about compensation for the role in your location during the hiring process.

Employees receive up to twelve paid holidays per calendar year, which includes one floating holiday (for non-exempt employees), plus a day off for their birthday. Non-Exempt new hires accrue up to 16 days of vacation time off each year, at a rate of 4.92 hours per pay period. Exempt new hires participate in Cisco’s flexible Vacation Time Off policy, which does not place a defined limit on how much vacation time eligible employees may use but is subject to availability and some business limitations. All new hires are eligible for Sick Time Off subject to Cisco’s Sick Time Off Policy and will have eighty (80) hours of sick time off provided on their hire date and on January 1st of each year thereafter. Up to 80 hours of unused sick time will be carried forward from one calendar year to the next such that the maximum number of sick time hours an employee may have available is 160 hours. Employees in Illinois have a unique time off program designed specifically with local requirements in mind. All employees also have access to paid time away to deal with critical or emergency issues. We offer additional paid time to volunteer and give back to the community.