Backend Software Development Engineer

Please note this posting is to advertise potential job opportunities. This exact role may not be open today but could open in the near future. When you apply, a Cisco representative may contact you directly if a relevant position opens.

Meet The Team
Cisco Spaces is the intelligence layer that turns buildings into dynamic, data-driven environments. By connecting to Cisco's global network of access points, sensors and cameras, Spaces delivers real-time insights and automation that help organizations run safer, smarter and more sustainable workplaces.

Today, Spaces is one of Cisco's fastest-growing platforms with more than twelve billion square feet of real estate digitized worldwide. As Cisco moves deeper into a software-first future, Spaces sits at the center of cloud, IoT, maps, analytics and AI.

The platform brings together everything needed for a modern hybrid workplace. It provides live occupancy and utilization insights, indoor maps, bookings, visitor flows, environmental and air-quality data, people and asset visibility, and automated workflows that make operations more efficient. Customers manage entire portfolios of buildings, connect third-party solutions through our partner ecosystem, and use our APIs to build new use cases on top of the platform.

Spaces is where large-scale cloud engineering, real-time data, AI and enterprise UX meet. We are a team that ships fast, innovates continuously and builds technology that genuinely changes how buildings function.

Your Impact
As a Backend Software Engineer on the Cisco Spaces team, you will shape the core systems that power one of Cisco's fastest-growing platforms. You will build the high-scale services that process billions of events, enable real-time building intelligence, and deliver reliable services to customers across the world.

• Design, implement, and deploy backend services that handle massive scale, high concurrency, and global reliability requirements.
• Build end-to-end systems in Java that prioritize performance, stability, and clean architecture.
• Develop APIs and microservices that power real-time occupancy, mapping, automation, IoT integrations, and analytics across thousands of enterprise sites.
• Work closely with frontend, product and platform teams to ensure seamless delivery of features that span cloud, IoT, mapping and AI layers.
• Optimize data pipelines, storage models, and streaming systems to support live telemetry from millions of connected devices.
• Introduce new technologies, frameworks, and design patterns that raise the engineering bar across the team.
• Contribute to platform-wide initiatives such as improving scalability, strengthening security, enhancing observability, and refining deployment and CI/CD practices.
• Learn and apply emerging AI and automation techniques where they materially improve system intelligence, accuracy, or developer efficiency.
• Own features from concept to rollout and ensure they meet the quality, reliability, and performance expected from Cisco-grade systems

Minimum Qualification

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Engineering or Computer Science.
• A minimum of two years of hands-on experience building backend systems, web applications, and integrations in production environments.
• Strong server-side development expertise in Java, with experience in J2EE, Vert.x, or Kotlin-based services.
• Deep understanding of core Java fundamentals including threading, concurrency, synchronization, collections, generics, annotations, and JVM internals.
• Familiarity with inter-thread communication patterns, serialization mechanisms, and performance tuning of high-throughput services.
• Strong grasp of object-oriented programming, data structures, algorithms, and common design patterns.
• Practical experience building scalable REST APIs, backend services, and microservice architectures.
• Working knowledge of NoSQL databases and distributed data models.
• Hands-on experience with Kafka or similar streaming platforms, including message modeling, high-volume consumers, producers, and streaming pipelines.
• Exposure to building and operating services in large-scale cloud environments such as AWS, and comfort working with cloud-native services.
• Proficiency with Maven or Gradle, Git, Jenkins, CI/CD pipelines, and related engineering tooling.
• Familiarity with distributed systems concepts including service discovery, fault tolerance, and event-driven architectures.
• Ability to work in fast-paced agile teams and drive technical decisions in complex development environments.
• Comfort using modern AI development tools and assistants to enhance productivity, improve code quality, and accelerate delivery.
• Ability to rapidly learn new frameworks, libraries, and technologies as required.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience designing and operating microservices at scale using Java, Vert.x, or Kotlin in high-throughput, low-latency environments.
• Hands-on experience running workloads on AWS, including EKS, EC2, S3, CloudWatch, IAM, Lambda or similar managed services.
• Strong familiarity with modern container and orchestration technologies such as Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, and service mesh patterns.
• Practical experience building streaming or event-driven architectures using Kafka, including partitions, consumer groups, offset handling, back-pressure strategies, and exactly-once semantics.
• Comfort troubleshooting distributed systems: debugging timeouts, thread starvation, queue backlogs, serialization bottlenecks, and GC/JVM performance issues.
• Experience with CI/CD, automated testing pipelines, canary deployments, observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK), and production monitoring best practices.
• Ability to analyze complex systems, decompose problems, reason about edge cases, and make thoughtful tradeoffs between performance, reliability, and simplicity.
• Familiarity with AI-assisted developer tools for rapid prototyping, code generation, unit test creation, architecture exploration, and productivity amplification.
• Experience driving process improvements, standardizing patterns, automating repetitive workflows, and influencing engineering best practices across teams.
• Strong analytical mindset with the ability to interpret metrics, logs, and behavioral trends to improve system performance and operational efficiency.
• Exposure to building secure, compliant, and resilient cloud-native systems with proper handling of authentication, authorization, encryption, and data privacy requirements.
• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment, handle ambiguity, and contribute effectively in cross-functional teams involving backend, frontend, product, and platform engineering.
• Passion for continuous learning and staying updated with new frameworks, cloud capabilities, architectural approaches, and emerging technologies.

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 experts, and you'll see that the opportunities to grow and build are limitless. We work as a team, collaborating with empathy to make really big things happen on a global scale. Because our solutions are everywhere, our impact is everywhere.

We are Cisco, and our power starts with you.