The Opportunity

We are seeking an exceptional Distinguished Engineer to architect next-generation security analytics and AI-powered capabilities within Netskope's 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 cybersecurity—and 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 world's largest enterprises.

What You'll 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 strategies—from hot operational storage to cold archive—balancing 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 intelligence—enabling security operations centers to detect, understand, and respond to threats in minutes instead of days. You'll directly impact the security posture of some of the world's most critical organizations.

What We're 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 applications—from ingestion through storage, processing, and semantic layers—with 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 distributed—demonstrating 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 risks—and 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
• You've navigated technology transitions (e.g., on-prem to cloud, monolithic to microservices, batch to streaming) and learned from what works and what doesn't

Impact & Influence

• You've 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)
• You're comfortable being the technical authority on hard problems—and equally comfortable saying "we need more data," "this approach won't 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
• You've 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

You'll join Netskope's Data & Analytics engineering organization—a globally distributed team of architects and builders who are modernizing how security intelligence flows through enterprises. You'll 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 track—it's 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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