Site Reliability Engineering Technical Leader

Who We Are

Cisco ThousandEyes is a Digital Assurance platform that empowers organizations to deliver flawless digital experiences across every network – even the ones they don’t own. Powered by AI and an unmatched set of cloud, internet and enterprise network telemetry data, ThousandEyes enables IT teams to proactively detect, diagnose, and remediate issues – before they impact end- user experiences.

ThousandEyes is deeply integrated across the entire Cisco technology portfolio and beyond, helping customers deploy at scale while also delivering AI-powered assurance insights within Cisco’s leading Networking, Security, Collaboration, and Observability portfolios.

About The Role

As a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Technical Leader on the Network Assurance Data Platform (NADP) team, you will play a key role in ensuring the reliability, scalability, and security of our cloud and big data platforms. You will represent the NADP SRE team, working in a dynamic environment, tackling challenges with creativity, providing technical leadership in defining and delivering on the team's technical roadmap. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams, including software development, product management, customers and security teams, to design, influence, build, and maintain SaaS systems operating at multi-region scale. Your work will directly impact the success of our machine learning (ML) and AI initiatives by ensuring the underlying platform infrastructure is robust, efficient, and aligned with operational excellence.

What You'll Do

In this role, you will:

• Design, build, and optimize cloud and data infrastructure to ensure the high availability, reliability, and scalability of big-data and ML/AI systems to meet customer needs, while implementing SRE principles such as monitoring, alerting, error budgets, and fault analysis.
• Collaborate closely with cross-functional teams, including customers, development, product management, and security teams, to create secure, scalable solutions that support ML/AI workloads and enhance operational efficiency through automation.
• Troubleshoot complex technical problems in production environments, perform root cause analyses, and contribute to continuous improvement efforts through postmortem reviews and proactive performance optimization.
• Lead the architectural vision and shape the team’s technical strategy and roadmap, balancing immediate needs with long-term goals, driving innovation, and influencing the technical direction.
• Serve as a mentor and technical leader, guiding teams and fostering a culture of engineering and operational excellence by sharing your deep knowledge and experience.
• Engage with customers and stakeholders to understand use cases and feedback, translating them into actionable insights and effectively influencing stakeholders at all levels.
• Utilize your strong programming skills to integrate software and systems engineering, building core data platform capabilities and automation to meet enterprise customer needs and roadmap objectives.
• Develop strategic roadmaps, processes, plans, and infrastructure to efficiently deploy new software components at an enterprise scale while enforcing engineering best practices.

Qualifications

• Have relevant experience (8-12 yrs) and a bachelor's engineering degree in computer science or its equivalent.
• Ability to design and implement scalable and well tested solutions, with focus on streamlining operations.
• Strong hands-on experience in Cloud preferably AWS.
• Strong Infrastructure as a Code skills, ideally with Terraform and EKS or Kubernetes.
• Experience with observability tools using Prometheus (Alertmanager), Grafana, Thanos, CloudWatch, OpenTelemetry, and the ELK
• Ability to write high quality code in Python, Go, or equivalent programming languages
• Good understanding of Unix/Linux systems, the kernel, system libraries, file systems, and client-server protocols.
• Experience building Cloud, Big data and/or ML/AI infrastructure (e.g. EMR, Airflow, Spark, PySpark, AWS SageMaker, AWS Bedrock etc.)
• Have experience with architecting software and infrastructure at scale with a sense of ownership and accountability.
• Bonus:  Experience with Hadoop (or similar) Ecosystem (Gobblin, Kafka, Iceberg, ORC, MapReduce, Yarn, HDFS, Hive, Spark, Hudi)
• Bonus:  Experience building/managing a cloud-based data platform, automation and orchestration of their infrastructure and maintaining high availability, system reliability at scale for big-data and ML/AI workloads.
• Bonus: Certifications: CKA (Certified Kubernetes Administrator), CKAD (Certified Kubernetes Application Developer), AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, or equivalent certifications in cloud and security domains.

Cisco values the perspectives and skills that emerge from employees with diverse backgrounds. That's why Cisco is expanding the boundaries of discovering top talent by not only focusing on candidates with educational degrees and experience but also placing more emphasis on unlocking potential. We believe that everyone has something to offer and that diverse teams are better equipped to solve problems, innovate, and create a positive impact.

We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification. Research shows that people from underrepresented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidacy. We urge you not to prematurely exclude yourself and to apply if you're interested in this work.