Level

Cisco

Software Engineer, Data & Scalability Platform (4-8 Yrs)

Cisco is hiring a Software Engineer, Data & Scalability Platform (4-8 Yrs) in Bengaluru, India. Level rates it ; you can apply on Cisco.

Level's read on this job

  • On Level's scale, this software engineer role is Works on AI ●●●○: the daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
  • The posting mentions Python, Go and AI agents among its tools and skills.
  • Level classes it as a mid-level role.
  • Cisco has 1,500+ other open roles on Level.

AI in this role

Build and scale data pipelines and backend services powering an AI agent resilience and evaluation platform.

pythongo
ai-agentsbackenddistributed-systemsscalabilitydata-pipelines

Meet the Team

The Splunk Agent Resilience team is defining the future of AI resilience. Our team provides scalable, cost-effective evaluation and guardrails that ensure AI agents behave as intended, improving reliability and reducing risks. This unified approach empowers our customers to confidently deploy and manage AI-powered applications with enhanced observability and control.

As a Software Engineer on the Data & Scalability Platform team, you will build and operate the systems that store, move, and transform every span, metric, and evaluation result the platform produces. You will own features end to end design, implementation, testing, and production support across our data stores, streaming pipelines, and processing services, and grow into the performance and capacity work that keeps the data plane fast and cost-effective as it scales.

Your Impact

  • Design, develop, test, and maintain backend services and data pipelines that operate at high scale.
  • Build and extend features across the platform's data stores, relational, analytical/columnar, object storage, and caching including schema changes and safe migrations.
  • Implement and tune the compute and pipelines that move and transform data, including stream processors, writers, and distributed worker fleets.
  • Solve concrete problems in scalability, reliability, performance, and fault tolerance along the data path.
  • Improve query and write performance through indexing, query tuning, and hot-path optimization.
  • Contribute to load testing, profiling, and benchmarking, and turn the results into targeted optimizations.
  • Add observability instrumentation so the components you build are measurable in production.
  • Write clean, scalable code and comprehensive tests, primarily in Python, with flexibility to use other backend languages such as Go.
  • Lead features from technical design through implementation, deployment, and production support.
  • Debug production issues across data stores, queues, and services, and participate in code reviews, on-call, postmortems, and root-cause analysis.
  • Drive improvements in engineering practices, automated testing, security, and reliability.

Minimum Qualifications

  • Bachelor's degree with 4+ years of related experience, or Master's degree with 2+ years, or PhD with 0 years of relevant software engineering experience.
  • Strong experience in backend engineering and building production-grade services.
  • Hands-on experience with large-scale distributed systems, with a focus on scalability, reliability, and performance.
  • Working experience with at least one database relational or analytical including schema design, query tuning, and safe migrations.
  • Experience with streaming or queueing systems (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ, Pulsar, Kinesis).
  • Strong proficiency in Python and experience with another backend programming language such as Go, Java, C++, or similar.
  • Strong fundamentals in system design, distributed systems, APIs, data structures, algorithms, and concurrency.
  • Experience with modern software engineering practices including CI/CD, automated testing, code reviews, Agile development, and production troubleshooting.

Preferred Qualifications

  • Experience with a columnar, analytical, or time-series store (e.g., ClickHouse, Druid, BigQuery, Snowflake).
  • Experience tuning queue consumers or async task workers for throughput — concurrency, batching, and backpressure.
  • Exposure to performance work: profiling, benchmarking, or load testing real systems and acting on the measurements.
  • Experience with cloud-native technologies, containerized environments (Kubernetes), and public cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or similar).
  • Experience with observability instrumentation and tooling (OpenTelemetry, metrics, tracing, logs).
  • Familiarity with multi-tenant systems, quotas, or rate limiting.
  • Experience with secure coding practices and privacy-by-design.
  • Strong communication skills and a collaborative approach to design and code review.


Why Cisco? 

At Cisco, we’re revolutionizing how data and infrastructure connect and protect organizations in the AI era – and beyond. We’ve been innovating fearlessly for 40 years to create solutions that power how humans and technology work together across the physical and digital worlds. These solutions provide customers with unparalleled security, visibility, and insights across the entire digital footprint.

Fueled by the depth and breadth of our technology, we experiment and create meaningful solutions. Add to that our worldwide network of doers and experts, and you’ll see that the opportunities to grow and build are limitless. We work as a team, collaborating with empathy to make really big things happen on a global scale. Because our solutions are everywhere, our impact is everywhere. 

We are Cisco, and our power starts with you. 


Disclaimer

To ensure that we hire the best talent in the right way, we follow a strict hiring process and recently, Cisco has been made aware of fraudulent recruiters claiming to be from the company. Please be advised that any communication from Cisco about careers will:

  • be in direct response to an application you have submitted through the company career site
  • begin with screening or an interview
  • originate from a Cisco email address, and
  • be conducted across email, phone, or WebEx

 

Cisco will never make a job offer without conducting an interview process or ask you for money in any way. If you have been requested to apply for a role or have received an offer from a site other than https://careers.cisco.com or cisco.wd5.myworkday.com, do not provide any personal identifying information, including your Aadhaar or other personal identifying number, birth certificate, banking information, driver's license, or passport.


If you are the target of a recruiting scam, consider filing a report with your local law enforcement authorities. Cisco bears no responsibility, and cannot be held liable, for any claims, damages, expenses, or other inconvenience resulting from or in any way connected to recruiting scams.


How we rate this

Software Engineer, Data & Scalability Platform (4-8 Yrs) at Cisco rates 65 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Works on AI (AI Level 3 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Works on AI. The daily work is on AI products, without building the model.

  1. ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
  2. ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
  3. ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
  4. ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.

Prepare for this job

Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

AI agentsBackendDistributed SystemsScalabilityData PipelinesPythonGo

Also common in software engineer jobs at this level

Pay

Typical software engineer job
$168k

This posting doesn't list pay. Use the typical software engineer figure when pay comes up. See software engineer jobs

Questions you could be asked

  1. How do you decide when an AI agent can act on its own versus asking for approval first?
  2. Tell me about a project where backend was part of your work. What did you do?
  3. Tell me about a project where distributed systems was part of your work. What did you do?
  4. Tell me about a project where scalability was part of your work. What did you do?
  5. Tell me about a project where data pipelines was part of your work. What did you do?

Adapt your resume

  • List these exact terms on your resume: AI agents, Backend, Distributed Systems, Scalability, and Data Pipelines. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
  • Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
  • Show where AI is part of your daily process, not a one-off project. This role expects it to be a running habit.

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