Principal Engineer - Platform Engineering
About The Position
The Platform Engineering organization is responsible for building and operating the foundational cloud-native platforms that power engineering across Cisco Network Platform. Our team owns the Kubernetes ecosystem used by thousands of developers, spanning hundreds of clusters across public and on-premise environments. We provide the infrastructure, automation, observability, security, and self-service capabilities that enable product teams to build and operate services reliably at scale. We are a highly collaborative team of SREs, who enjoy solving complex distributed systems challenges. Our culture emphasizes ownership, operational excellence, automation, and continuous improvement. This is an opportunity to shape the future of Kubernetes and platform engineering within Cisco Network Platform while influencing the experience of engineers across the company.
Requirements
- 15+ years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems in production environments.
- 7+ years of hands-on experience operating Kubernetes platforms in production, including multi-cluster environments.
- Experience architecting and operating cloud-native infrastructure across AWS, Azure, GCP, or hybrid cloud environments.
- Experience designing, operating, and troubleshooting networking architectures for large-scale Kubernetes platforms, including CNI implementations, ingress and egress traffic management, service-to-service communication, multi-cluster connectivity, and network observability.
- Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code and GitOps technologies, including Terraform and ArgoCD or equivalent platforms.
- Strong communication and leadership skills with the ability to effectively influence engineers, architects, senior leaders, and executive stakeholders.
- Proven track record leading cross-organizational platform initiatives and influencing technical strategy across multiple engineering teams.
- Experience implementing SRE practices, including SLOs, incident management, production readiness reviews, and operational excellence programs.
- Strong software engineering experience with Go, Python, or similar programming languages used for automation and platform development.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with migrating monolithic applications to a microservices architecture.
- Knowledge of networking (i.e. switching, routing, wifi, IoT).
Responsibilities
- Architect and drive the evolution of Kubernetes platform strategy across cloud and on-premises environments supporting mission-critical workloads at scale.
- Lead the design and implementation of platform capabilities that improve reliability, security, scalability, and developer productivity for hundreds of engineering teams.
- Partner with engineering, security, and product leaders to define multi-year platform roadmaps and drive execution of company-critical initiatives.
- Provide technical leadership during major incidents, architecture reviews, platform transformations, and strategic infrastructure investments.
- Mentor senior engineers and help raise the engineering bar through technical leadership, design reviews, operational excellence, and architectural guidance.
Benefits
- medical, dental and vision insurance
- a 401(k) plan with a Cisco matching contribution
- paid parental leave
- short and long-term disability coverage
- basic life insurance
- Cisco restricted stock units
- 10 paid holidays per full calendar year
- 1 floating holiday for non-exempt employees
- 1 paid day off for employee’s birthday
- paid year-end holiday shutdown
- 4 paid days off for personal wellness
- 16 days of paid vacation time per full calendar year (non-exempt)
- flexible vacation time off program (exempt)
- 80 hours of sick time off provided on hire date and each January 1st thereafter
- up to 80 hours of unused sick time carried forward
- Additional paid time away may be requested to deal with critical or emergency issues for family members
- Optional 10 paid days per full calendar year to volunteer
- annual bonuses (for non-sales roles)
- performance-based incentive pay (for sales roles)
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Principal
Education Level
No Education Listed
