Data Engineering Technical Leader - CX AI at Cisco in San Jose, CA

Job description

The application window is expected to close on: 12/30/2026 This is a Hybrid role requiring work onsite Tuesday-Thursday. Meet the Team Cisco's Customer Experience (CX) organization is a high-growth, innovation-driven team focused on delivering a unified digital experience for customers and partners. The CX Platform enables diverse CX use cases through modern cloud-native architecture and emerging AI capabilities, including predictive and generative AI. Our team builds scalable, reliable platforms that accelerate customer outcomes, with a strong focus on quality, urgency, ownership, and data-driven decision making. Your Impact You will be the architectural and technical authority driving our next-generation cloud-native data platform. Operating as a hands-on builder and leader, you will own distributed data pipelines, lakehouse architectures, and backend services end-to-end—powering real-time CX analytics and AI-ready data foundations. You will establish organizational standards for data modeling, streaming, and observability while mentoring engineering pods and aligning technical execution with strategic business priorities. Key Responsibilities Data Platform Architecture: Architect, build, and optimize scalable cloud-native backend services and data platforms supporting high-throughput ingestion, real-time analytics, and downstream AI/ML consumption. Pipeline & Lakehouse Engineering: Design robust batch and streaming ETL/ELT pipelines, implementing event-driven data flows, Change Data Capture (CDC), and modern lakehouse architectures (e.g., Snowflake, Databricks). Data Quality & Observability: Establish enterprise-grade standards for data modeling, semantic layers, schema governance, distributed tracing, and real-time telemetry/alerting to ensure high data integrity and reliability. API & Service Integration: Define high-performance API contracts (REST, GraphQL) and backend microservices that expose trusted datasets and metrics for self-service reporting and AI applications. Technical Leadership & Governance: Drive CI/CD automation, conduct code and design reviews, mentor senior and mid-level data engineers, and coordinate cross-team technical dependencies across platform, security, and product stakeholders. Minimum Qualifications Bachelor’s degree with 8+ years of related experience, or a Masters degree with 6+ years of related experience. Experience in Python and SQL for data engineering, automation, and transformation, along with backend development experience in languages such as Go, Java, Node.js, or Rust. Experience designing REST or GraphQL APIs, with experience in relational PostgreSQL, MySQL and/or NoSQL databases. Experience implementing distributed messaging and streaming systems using Apache Kafka, AWS SQS/SNS, or comparable technologies. Experience building and optimizing data platforms using modern lakehouse/warehouse technologies such as Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, or AWS Redshift or similar. Experience building, maintaining, and troubleshooting automated CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins, GitHub Actions or similar and containerized deployments. Preferred Qualifications Expertise in large-scale data ingestion architectures, Change Data Capture (CDC), and multi-source ETL/ELT across APIs, databases, event streams, and object storage (S3/GCS). Experience structuring semantic models and feature stores to support data science, predictive modeling, and generative AI/LLM applications. Experience implementing end-to-end data observability, lineage tracking, and monitoring frameworks (e.g., OpenTelemetry, Datadog, Prometheus). Familiarity leveraging AI-assisted development tools (Copilot, Cursor) and AIOps practices to accelerate development velocity and reliability. Demonstrated track record of technical mentorship, driving architectural consensus across matrixed teams, and translating business goals into robust engineering roadmaps. Why Cisco? At Cisco, we’re revolutionizing how data and infrastructure connect and p