Role Description Splunk is seeking a senior individual contributor to serve as the technical lead for the AI agents that make our technical sellers more productive, setting direction through thought leadership and influence across field teams. The role spans the full agent lifecycle across multiple platforms: - Setting best practices for cost, performance, design, and integrations. - Deciding which agents are built where. - Completing the last-mile build. - Maintaining a subset in production. - Directing and reviewing a contractor who builds additional agents. Your immediate mission is to deliver an initial 3 to 5 agents that streamline technical sellers’ daily workflows, freeing them to spend more time customer-facing and advancing Splunk’s revenue and customer-success goals. Responsibilities - Agentic Platform Strategy (Architect) - Reference Design & Standards: Advise on the end-to-end design for agentic systems across platforms. - Cross-Platform Best Practices: Define, document, and evangelize best practices for cost, performance, design, and integrations. - Platform Selection & Build Allocation: Guide which agents are built on which platform, balancing capability, cost, integration fit, security, and maintainability. - Contractor Direction & Review: Set technical direction for a contractor building agents, specifying what to build and where. - Technical Thought Leadership & Influence: Serve as the recognized technical authority for agentic systems across field teams. - Strategic Impact: Advance Splunk’s revenue and customer-success goals by increasing technical sellers’ customer-facing time. - Agent Delivery & Engineering (Build) - Deliver Seller-Productivity Agents: Own delivery of an initial 3 to 5 production agents that streamline technical sellers’ daily workflows. - Last-Mile Build & Integration: Complete the last-mile build of agents, wiring up tools, Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers and clients, data sources, and integrations. - Agent Design & Orchestration: Translate the reference design into working agentic systems with evaluation and guardrails designed in from the start. - Agentic Operations (Operate) - Observability & Monitoring: Establish comprehensive logging, monitoring, and alerting for agents in production. - Performance & Cost Evaluation: Track resource consumption across agentic workloads and define and monitor SLOs/SLIs. - Governance & Guardrails: Define the boundaries that keep agents safe, within budget, and compliant with security and regulatory standards. - Continuous Optimization & Maintenance: Maintain a subset of production agents, resolving regressions and keeping them current. Qualifications - 3+ years of software, ML, or platform engineering experience. - Proven ability to act as a technical authority and force multiplier. - Hands-on experience designing and building production agentic systems. - Experience selecting among and building across multiple agent platforms. - Strong tool and API integration skills. - Experience building evaluation harnesses and validating agentic systems in simulation. - Experience implementing guardrails, policy and permission models, and audit trails. - Familiarity with token and cost management across multiple LLM providers. - Experience directing and reviewing the work of contractors, vendors, or peer engineers. - Hands-on experience operating agents in production. - Experience with Splunk products for telemetry, monitoring, and observability. - Proficiency in cloud-native architectures, preferably AWS. - Experience in programming/scripting languages such as Python and Bash. - Understanding of distributed systems, microservices architecture, and API design. Requirements - Strong strategic thinking and ability to translate business objectives into technical roadmaps. - Excellent communication skills with ability to present technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders. - Track record of delivering results in fast-paced, dynamic environments. - Data-driven decision-making approach with focus on measurable outcomes. Core Values and Mindsets - Commitment to Excellence: A dedication to delivering high-quality solutions and continuous improvement. - Adaptability / Flexibility: A growth mindset and openness to feedback. - Collaboration: A strong team player attitude and commitment to empowering colleagues. - Ownership: A proactive approach to improvement and accountability for outcomes. - Innovation: A passion for creative problem-solving and maintaining high standards. - Fun: An ability to embrace fun and contribute to a positive culture.