Distinguished Engineer - Data Architect

SonicWall is a cybersecurity forerunner with more than 30 years of expertise and is recognized as a leading partner-first company, ensuring our partners and their customers are never alone in the fight against cybercrime. With the ability to build, scale and manage security across the cloud, hybrid and traditional environments in real-time, SonicWall provides relentless security against the most evasive cyberattacks across endless exposure points for increasingly remote, mobile and cloud-enabled users. With its own threat research center, SonicWall can quickly and economically provide purpose-built security solutions to enable any organization—enterprise, government agencies and SMBs—around the world. For more information, visit

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Job Title: Distinguished Engineer - Data Architect Role Overview: We are looking for a Distinguished Engineer- Data Architect to design and build the data foundation for our AI-driven security platform. In this role, you will own the architectural blueprint and core implementation of our data strategy, transforming massive streams of high-velocity network traffic logs, customer configurations, and security alerts into high-performance, ML-ready data fabrics. As part of a lean, elite three-person Data & AI team, you will serve as the ultimate technical authority on data scale, streaming architecture, multi-tenant security, and cost-efficient storage systems.

Key Responsibilities:

• Architect the Core Data Platform: Design, implement, and evolve a unified blueprint for streaming and batch data processing capable of ingesting, normalizing, and storing petabyte-scale, high-velocity security telemetry.
• Enable AI & Advanced Analytics: Partner directly with the Lead AI Engineer to architect the underlying storage, retrieval systems, and feature stores—including optimal vector database structures and data lakehouse layers—required for low-latency AI inference and training.
• Enforce Zero-Trust Data Governance: Architect strict multi-tenant isolation, data privacy guardrails, and compliance controls directly into the data fabric to protect sensitive customer network configurations and logs.
• Optimize Economics & Performance: Drive infrastructure cost-efficiency and performance tuning across data processing engines, storage layers, and cloud infrastructure, balancing ultra-low latency requirements with predictable cost scaling.
• Lead by Example: Write clean, foundational, high-performance code for critical infrastructure components, setting the standard for engineering excellence within the team.

Required Experience & Skills:

• Experience:

12+ years of data engineering and architecture experience, with a proven track record of designing production systems handling massive, high-throughput streaming datasets (e.g., networking logs, telemetry, or real-time event streams).

• Distributed Systems Expertise: Deep, authoritative knowledge of distributed processing and streaming engines (e.g., Apache Flink, Spark, Kafka, Pulsar) and modern lakehouse architectures (e.g., Iceberg, Delta Lake).
• Hybrid Storage Architecture: Mastery of polyglot persistence, spanning traditional relational databases, NoSQL, Columnar engines (e.g., ClickHouse, DuckDB), and Vector databases (e.g., Milvus, Qdrant, Pinecone).
• Security & Infrastructure: Strong fundamentals in secure data architectures, network topography, encryption-at-rest/in-transit, containerization (Kubernetes), and cloud-native infrastructure (AWS/GCP/Azure).
• Mindset: A rare combination of visionary architecture and hands-on execution. You thrive in ultra-lean teams, enjoy writing core code, and possess the pragmatism to build for immediate needs while planning for massive scale. SonicWall is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to creating a diverse environment and are an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, age, marital status, veteran status, pregnancy, or any other basis prohibited by applicable law. At SonicWall, we pride ourselves on recruiting a diverse mix of talented people and providing active security solutions in 100+ countries. Applicant Privacy Notice