Senior Manager, IQ Platform Infrastructure

Cisco•San Jose, CA

10d•$214,100 - $309,800•Hybrid

About The Position

This role leads the platform infrastructure team: the framework and common services that product teams build against, and the on-premises appliance platform our customers run in their own data centers. The team is small and senior — principal engineers and technical leads who have been doing this a long time and have strong opinions. It is also about to get considerably bigger. You will own the platform framework, common services and the on-premises appliance platform for Cisco IQ, working with a globally distributed team split across the US, Europe and India. Roughly half this job is technical direction. We are in the middle of normalizing our APIs and consolidating a framework that grew up in pieces across several teams. You will set the direction for that work, make the calls on what gets standardized versus what stays flexible, and keep the same foundation serving both our SaaS and appliance deployments rather than letting the two quietly fork. The other half is building the team. You are inheriting a strong senior core and the team is expanding. Hiring, onboarding and figuring out how a much larger team stays coordinated will be a real part of your first few months. This is a hands-on role. You will be in design reviews, architecture debates and postmortems, and you should be able to read the code and challenge a technical decision on the merits. You are leading principal engineers who have earned their opinions — but you do need to hold your own with them. Day to day you will work closely with Product management, SRE, Experience Reliability Engineering, other groups in IO services and with the technical leads driving on-premises deployment and framework work. Platform decisions land on other people's roadmaps, so a lot of the job is making sure those conversations happen early.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree and 15+ years of relevant professional experience.
5+ years managing software engineers (specifically Senior & Principal-level), including hiring, coaching and performance management.
Technical engineering experience with platform, infrastructure or distributed systems at a company shipping enterprise-scale software.
Experience owning a platform or shared services layer that other engineering teams depend on, including the roadmap and technical direction for it.
Delivered cloud-native software to production (Kubernetes, containers, microservices, CI/CD), as an engineer or a leader who stayed close to it.
Demonstrated track record of growing & developing teams while keeping delivery on track.

Nice To Haves

Experience with both SaaS and on-premises or customer-deployed products, and the trade-offs that come with supporting both from one codebase.
API design and normalization work at scale — versioning, deprecation, migrating consumers off old interfaces without breaking them.
Worked and delivered products using Cloud Native technologies
Managed teams distributed across time zones, particularly US and India.
Demonstrated depth in one or more of: platform frameworks, IAM and multi-tenancy, containerized runtime, appliance lifecycle and upgrade.
Uses AI-assisted tooling to speed up engineering work, and thoughtful about where it helps and where it does not.
Clear communicator in writing. Much of the coordination in a distributed org happens in docs and reviews rather than meetings.
Experience partnering with SRE and reliability functions on shared infrastructure ownership.

Responsibilities

Own the platform framework, common services and the on-premises appliance platform for Cisco IQ.
Set the technical direction for API normalization and framework consolidation.
Make decisions on standardization versus flexibility in the platform.
Ensure the platform serves both SaaS and appliance deployments without forking.
Build and grow the platform infrastructure team, including hiring and onboarding.
Coordinate a larger, globally distributed team.
Participate in design reviews, architecture debates, and postmortems.
Challenge technical decisions based on merit.
Collaborate with Product Management, SRE, Experience Reliability Engineering, and other IO services groups.
Work with technical leads on on-premises deployment and framework work.
Ensure early conversations about platform decisions that impact other roadmaps.

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
grants of 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)