Senior Site Reliability Engineer – Observability

Cisco • San Francisco, CA

1d • $167,700 - $245,200 • Onsite

About The Position

Join the Observability team within Cloud Network Platform Engineering’s Site Reliability Engineering organization. You will help design, build, and operate enterprise observability platforms for logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting across large-scale cloud infrastructure. This role will contribute to customer-facing production services, with an initial focus on Kubernetes-based platform workloads such as Nextunnel and broader SRE and reliability initiatives over time. You will lead efforts that improve visibility, reduce time to detect and resolve incidents, increase platform reliability, and strengthen operational excellence across Cisco’s cloud environment. The role includes participation in a shared SRE pager and on-call rotation, production support, and incident response.

Requirements

• 7+ years of related experience, or Master + 4 years of related experience, or PhD + 1 year of related experience in Site Reliability Engineering, Platform Engineering, DevOps, or a related field.
• Experience administering Splunk Enterprise or Splunk Cloud in a production environment, with solid understanding of Splunk SPL for dashboards and alerts.
• Experience designing, deploying, and operating Elasticsearch or ELK-based platforms, along with Prometheus, Grafana, distributed tracing (Grafana Tempo, OpenTelemetry), and Kafka.
• Experience in Infrastructure as Code using Terraform and understanding of Linux, networking, distributed systems, and production operations.
• Programming or scripting experience in Python, Go, Ruby, Bash, or similar languages, with demonstrated ability to troubleshoot production incidents and participate in on-call support.

Nice To Haves

• Splunk certification.
• Experience with Kubernetes and containerized production workloads.
• Experience operating cloud infrastructure in AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Experience with Ansible, Consul, CI/CD pipelines, or service mesh technologies.
• Experience with reliability engineering practices, including SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, capacity planning, and incident management.
• Demonstrated experience implementing and operating modern observability strategies across logs, metrics, and traces
• Experience supporting FedRAMP, government, or other regulated environments.
• Experience building secure, highly available, and compliant observability platforms.
• Experience leading cross-functional technical initiatives from proposal through implementation.
• Strong communication, collaboration, and problem-solving skills.

Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, operate, and continuously improve enterprise observability platforms.
• Build and maintain Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud infrastructure, including indexers, Search Head Clusters, heavy forwarders, deployment servers, and related integrations.
• Deploy and operate large-scale Elasticsearch clusters supporting log analytics, search, and operational troubleshooting.
• Design, deploy, and support distributed tracing platforms using Grafana Tempo and OpenTelemetry.
• Build and maintain end-to-end telemetry pipelines for logs, metrics, and traces.
• Define instrumentation standards, data quality practices, retention policies, and observability patterns.
• Scale and optimize Prometheus, Grafana, Kafka, Tempo, OpenTelemetry, and related monitoring systems.
• Develop dashboards, alerts, analytics, and trace visualizations using Splunk SPL, Grafana, Kibana, and Tempo.
• Establish monitoring and alerting standards that improve service-level visibility and reduce mean time to detect and resolve incidents.
• Automate infrastructure provisioning, configuration, upgrades, and operational processes using Terraform and configuration management tools.
• Participate in capacity planning, performance tuning, upgrades, patching, disaster recovery, and production readiness reviews.
• Troubleshoot complex distributed-systems issues and lead or support incident response and root-cause analysis.
• Partner with platform, application, security, database, and network engineering teams to improve reliability and operational consistency.
• Contribute to shared SRE standards, documentation, runbooks, and engineering best practices.
• Participate in the shared SRE pager and on-call rotation for production services.

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
• 10 paid holidays per full calendar year, plus 1 floating holiday for non-exempt employees
• 1 paid day off for employee’s birthday, paid year-end holiday shutdown, and 4 paid days off for personal wellness determined by Cisco
• 16 days of paid vacation time per full calendar year, accrued at rate of 4.92 hours per pay period for full-time employees (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 from one calendar year to the next
• Optional 10 paid days per full calendar year to volunteer
• annual bonuses (non-sales roles)
• performance-based incentive pay (sales roles)

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior