The Opportunity

We are seeking an exceptional Distinguished Engineer to architect next-generation security analytics and AI-powered capabilities within Netskopes platform. This is a high-impact individual contributor role designed for an engineer who excels at solving complex technical problems at the intersection of artificial intelligence large-scale data systems and cybersecurityand who thrives when working on problems that matter.

As a Distinguished Engineer you will be a technical authority and strategic thought leader designing and implementing sophisticated systems that leverage cutting-edge AI/ML techniques graph-based analytics and real-time data processing to solve critical security challenges that protect the worlds largest enterprises.

What Youll Own

Your scope spans the full architecture of our security analytics platform:

• Intelligent Data Ingestion & Processing: Design high-throughput fault-tolerant systems that ingest and normalize security data at massive scale while maintaining data fidelity and cost efficiency
• Next-Generation Query & Analytics: Evaluate select and optimize query engines (e.g. Trino ClickHouse StarRocks Spark) to deliver sub-second insights on petabyte-scale datasets
• Semantic Layer for Agentic AI: Build the data abstraction and access layer that enables AI agents to reason over security data autonomously securely and accurately
• Tiered Storage Architecture: Design intelligent data lifecycle strategiesfrom hot operational storage to cold archivebalancing query performance cost and compliance
• Intelligent Automation & Detection: Develop ML-driven threat detection anomaly identification and automated response mechanisms that scale across millions of events per second

Why This Matters

Security teams at enterprise scale are drowning in data but starving for insight. Your systems will transform raw telemetry into actionable intelligenceenabling security operations centers to detect understand and respond to threats in minutes instead of days. Youll directly impact the security posture of some of the worlds most critical organizations.

What Were Looking For

14 Years of Data Infrastructure & Application Architecture

You bring a track record of designing and building enterprise-scale data systems across multiple technology cycles:

• Architected and shipped large-scale data platforms (data lakes warehouses or real-time analytics systems) that process 100GB daily volumes at petabyte scale
• Designed end-to-end data pipelines and applicationsfrom ingestion through storage processing and semantic layerswith deep understanding of trade-offs across consistency availability scalability and cost
• Led technical decisions on data technologies (distributed databases query engines stream processors storage systems) based on principled analysis of requirements and constraints
• Built systems that evolved from single-region to global from batch to real-time from monolithic to distributeddemonstrating ability to architect for scale at each inflection point
• Mentored and influenced other architects and engineers through technical clarity and demonstrated judgment on complex problems

Technical Excellence in Data Systems

• Deep expertise in distributed systems design data architecture patterns and ML systems engineering
• Proven ability to make principled trade-offs between performance cost scalability reliability and operational complexity
• Strong hands-on foundation in modern data stack: cloud-native architectures (AWS GCP Azure) data lakes and lakehouses streaming platforms (Kafka Kinesis) query engines (Trino ClickHouse Presto) and orchestration frameworks
• Experience designing tiered storage strategies data governance and schema management at scale
• Comfort with both batch and real-time processing paradigms; understanding of when to apply each

Architectural Thinking

• You design systems that others execute on not just execute systems others designed
• You anticipate failure modes performance cliffs operational complexity and vendor lock-in risksand design them out
• You can speak fluently about graph databases semantic layers LLM integration observability and their security and operational implications
• You balance innovation with pragmatism; you build the minimum necessary sophistication to solve the problem not the most technically interesting solution
• Youve navigated technology transitions (e.g. on-prem to cloud monolithic to microservices batch to streaming) and learned from what works and what doesnt

Impact & Influence

• Youve shipped systems that scaled beyond their original design; you learned from and improved them at each scale inflection
• You communicate complex technical ideas clearly to both technical audiences (architects engineers infrastructure teams) and non-technical stakeholders (product security executives)
• Youre comfortable being the technical authority on hard problemsand equally comfortable saying we need more data this approach wont scale or we should use boring proven technology here
• You thrive in ambiguity and can drive clarity through technical investigation prototyping and principled decision-making
• Youve influenced product and platform strategy through technical depth and credibility

Bonus Strengths

• Experience with LLMs RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) or agentic AI systems in data-heavy contexts
• Background in cybersecurity threat detection security analytics or adjacent high-stakes domains (fraud detection financial crime compliance)
• Track record building platforms that others depend on (vs. point solutions) and maintain in production
• Contributions to open-source data projects or thought leadership in data architecture communities

The Environment

Youll join Netskopes Data & Analytics engineering organizationa globally distributed team of architects and builders who are modernizing how security intelligence flows through enterprises. Youll work closely with:

• Product & Security: Partner with product leaders and security researchers to understand emerging threats and translate them into data requirements
• Platform Teams: Collaborate with infrastructure SRE and platform engineers to ensure your systems operate reliably at scale
• Customer Engineering: Engage with our largest customers to validate that your architectures solve real-world security challenges

This role is not a manager trackits a deep technical leadership position where your influence comes from the clarity of your thinking and the impact of your work.

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