Job Title: Senior Director, Engineering-AI Toolkit Team
Location: (San Jose and Seattle Preferred)
About Splunk
Splunk, a Cisco company, is building a safer and more resilient digital world with an end-to-end full stack platform made for a hybrid, multi-cloud world. Leading enterprises use our unified security and observability platform to keep their digital systems secure and reliable. Our customers love our technology, but it's our caring employees that make Splunk stand out as an amazing career destination. No matter where in the world or what level of the organization, we approach our work with kindness. So bring your work experience, problem-solving skills and talent, of course, but also bring your joy, your passion and all the things that make you, you. Come help organizations be their best, while you reach new heights with a team that has your back.
Role:
We are looking for an experienced and visionary Senior Director of Engineering to lead our AI Toolkit Engineering team. This role is instrumental in shaping and scaling the toolchains and infrastructure that power AI capabilities for both our customers and internal teams. You will drive the strategy, development, and operations of the AI toolkits and platform, and ensure the reliability and performance of our AI service infrastructure in the Cloud and on premise.
As a senior leader, you will work closely with AI product, engineering and platform teams to deliver developer-first tooling, robust infrastructure, and high-availability services. This is a critical role in our AI organization, reporting directly to the VP of AI.
On a day-to-day basis, you’ll spend your time guiding engineering leads through key architectural decisions, collaborating with cross-functional partners to align on roadmap priorities, and diving into service reliability or infrastructure scalability discussions. You'll review high-impact design documents, help unblock critical technical challenges, and ensure smooth operation of our production AI services. You’ll also coach and develop engineering managers, foster a culture of technical excellence, and ensure the team delivers with both speed and quality.
Responsibilities:
The responsibilities of this role include:
Lead the end-to-end development of AI toolkits that accelerate model development, deployment, and monitoring for internal and external users
Oversee the operations and reliability of AI services in production, including model serving, inference infrastructure, and pipeline orchestration
Drive the engineering strategy, architectural decisions, and execution roadmap for AI tooling and infrastructure
Collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders including AI/ML product, engineering, data engineering, security, and DevOps teams
Hire, grow, and mentor a high-performing team of engineering managers and technical leads
Set high standards for engineering excellence, observability, and operational efficiency
Own service-level objectives (SLOs), performance, cost-efficiency, and uptime of AI infrastructure in the Cloud
Stay ahead of trends in AI tooling, MLOps, and infrastructure to inform strategic investments and improvements
Requirements:
The ideal candidates should meet the following requirements:
12+ years of software engineering experience with 5+ years in engineering leadership roles, preferably in AI/ML or infrastructure domains
Deep experience leading platform or infrastructure teams building developer tools, SDKs, and/or distributed systems
Proven track record of operating and scaling cloud-based services (e.g., AWS, GCP, or Azure)
Strong familiarity with modern AI/ML lifecycle tooling and infrastructure, such as:
Model development: PyTorch, TensorFlow, Hugging Face, LangChain
Experiment tracking: MLflow, Weights & Biases
Model serving & inference: Triton Inference Server, TorchServe, Ray Serve, KServe
Pipeline orchestration: Airflow, Argo Workflows, Kubeflow, Metaflow
Containerization & orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes, Helm
Observability & monitoring: Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry
Strong technical foundation in distributed systems, CI/CD pipelines, and service reliability engineering
Excellent people leadership, communication, and cross-functional collaboration skills
Experience operating in fast-paced environments, with the ability to make high-impact decisions with ambiguity
These additional skills and experiences are preferred but not required:
Experience working in AI platform, MLOps, or developer experience-focused teams
Hands-on experience with large language model (LLM) infrastructure and serving at scale
Background in security, compliance, or data privacy for AI infrastructure
Contributions to open source AI infrastructure or tools
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.
Annual Base Pay: $315,000 - $364,000 USD Bay Area Location
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.
U.S. employees have access to quality medical, dental and vision insurance, a 401(k) plan with a Cisco matching contribution, short and long-term disability coverage, basic life insurance and numerous wellbeing offerings.
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.
Employees on sales plans earn performance-based incentive pay on top of their base salary, which is split between quota and non-quota components. For quota-based incentive pay, Cisco typically pays as follows:
.75% of incentive target for each 1% of revenue attainment up to 50% of quota;
1.5% of incentive target for each 1% of attainment between 50% and 75%;
1% of incentive target for each 1% of attainment between 75% and 100%; and once performance exceeds 100% attainment, incentive rates are at or above 1% for each 1% of attainment with no cap on incentive compensation.
For non-quota-based sales performance elements such as strategic sales objectives, Cisco may pay up to 125% of target. Cisco sales plans do not have a minimum threshold of performance for sales incentive compensation to be paid.
