Senior Manager, Software Engineering

Job description

Splunk, a Cisco company, is building a safer and more resilient digital world with an end-to-end, full-stack platform designed for a hybrid, multi-cloud world. Leading enterprises use Splunk’s unified security and observability platform to keep their digital systems secure, reliable, and performant. Our customers love our technology, but it is our people, culture, and commitment to each other that make Splunk an exceptional place to work. We bring technical excellence, curiosity, kindness, and ownership to everything we do. Come help organizations be their best while you reach new heights with a team that has your back. Meet the teamThe App Platform organization provides foundational capabilities that enable developers, partners, and customers to build, run, secure, and operate applications on Splunk. Within App Platform, the App Runtime team is responsible for critical runtime capabilities that allow Splunk applications to execute in a secure, reliable, isolated, and operationally manageable way. The team is working on strategic platform initiatives that strengthen Splunk’s security posture through standardized containerization and runtime technologies. These capabilities improve application isolation, developer experience, operational control, and the long-term scalability of Splunk’s app ecosystem. This is a high-impact platform leadership role for someone who enjoys leading teams that build foundational systems used across products, engineering organizations, and customer-facing experiences. Your impactAs Senior Manager, Software Engineering — App Runtime, you will lead the engineering team responsible for building and evolving core App Runtime capabilities within Splunk’s App Platform. You will own a strategic platform area that is central to application security, runtime isolation, developer productivity, and operational reliability. You will partner closely with Product Management, Architecture, Security, Cloud, SRE, Core Platform, and other engineering teams to define strategy, shape the roadmap, and deliver durable platform capabilities. Success in this role will be measured by your ability to build a high-performing team, deliver secure and scalable runtime systems, influence cross-functional strategy, and create a platform that makes Splunk applications easier and safer to build, run, and operate. You are a seasoned engineering leader who can balance technical depth with organizational leadership. You can guide architecture and execution, mentor senior engineers, develop managers or future leaders, communicate clearly with executives and stakeholders, and create an inclusive environment where engineers do their best work. In this role, you willLead the App Runtime engineering team within Splunk App Platform, owning execution and delivery for a strategic platform capability area. Define and drive the technical and execution roadmap in partnership with Product Management, Architecture, Security, SRE, and cross-functional engineering stakeholders. Build secure, isolated, scalable, and reliable runtime capabilities for Splunk applications using modern containerization and platform technologies. Improve developer experience by enabling application teams to build, package, deploy, operate, and troubleshoot applications more efficiently. Strengthen operational control and production readiness through clear ownership models, observability, reliability practices, incident response, service health metrics, and continuous improvement. Partner with security and architecture teams to ensure App Runtime capabilities meet Splunk’s standards for isolation, governance, compliance, reliability, and long-term maintainability. Diagnose and remove systemic execution obstacles that prevent the team from delivering high-quality software predictably. Lead the full software development lifecycle, from planning and architecture through implementation, release, operation, and ongoing improvement. Hire, coach, mentor, and develop engineering talent, including senior engineers and emerging technical or people leaders. Create a high-performing, inclusive, accountable, and collaborative team culture. Communicate strategy, tradeoffs, risks, execution status, and technical concepts clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders. Advocate for scalable, extensible, recoverable, manageable, and secure architecture across App Platform and related Splunk platform capabilities. What we’re looking forProven experience leading engineering teams that deliver enterprise-grade software, cloud platform capabilities, distributed systems, developer platforms, infrastructure, or runtime services. Strong technical judgment and the ability to guide architectural decisions for secure, scalable, reliable, and maintainable systems. Experience building, operating, or leading teams responsible for production services with clear reliability, observability, incident response, and operational excellence practices. Demonstrated ability to hire, retain, mentor, and grow engineering talent across multiple levels of seniority. Experience leading through ambiguity, setting direction, making tradeoffs, and aligning teams around clear priorities. Strong cross-functional leadership skills, with experience partnering across Product, Architecture, Security, SRE, Support, and other engineering teams. A consistent track record of delivering high-quality software in fast-paced, geographically distributed organizations. Strong communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical topics to executives, product leaders, engineers, and non-technical stakeholders. Experience building strong engineering practices, including planning, design reviews, code quality, testing strategy, release management, operational readiness, and continuous improvement. High ownership, sound judgment, emotional intelligence, and a commitment to creating an inclusive and collaborative team environment. Nice to haveExperience with containerization technologies, Kubernetes, sandboxing, secure runtimes, application isolation, or multi-tenant execution environments. Experience building internal developer platforms, application platforms, plugin frameworks, extension runtimes, or app ecosystems. Experience with cloud-native infrastructure, CI/CD systems, service orchestration, observability, security frameworks, or platform governance. Experience leading teams that operate business-critical platform services at enterprise scale. Experience working in both large-company and high-growth environments. Familiarity with Splunk, security, observability, data platforms, or enterprise SaaS platforms. What we offer youA constant stream of new things to learn. We are always expanding into new areas, adopting and contributing to open source technologies, and exploring modern approaches to platform engineering. Exceptionally talented and dedicated peers across engineering, product management, security, architecture, SRE, customer success, and support. Growth and mentorship through ownership, leadership opportunities, and collaboration with experienced technical and people leaders. A stable, collaborative, and supportive work environment where people are encouraged to bring curiosity, kindness, and accountability to their work. The opportunity to see the positive impact of your work on real customers and on the engineers building the next generation of Splunk applications. 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 exper