Software Engineering Technical Leader
About The Position
The Site Reliability Engineering – Security team makes Cisco CX Engineering's software systems secure, resilient, and fast to build on. We own the security posture of production infrastructure and of the internal platforms engineers depend on every day — Kubernetes control planes, GitOps and CI/CD pipelines, observability stacks, and AI/ML operations. We sit at the intersection of Platform, Security, Compliance, and Operations, so our work shapes how hundreds of engineers ship software. We are a small, senior, high-autonomy team that values deep technical ownership, blameless learning, and automating our way out of toil. Our largest and newest platform is Cisco IQ, the AI-powered front door to all of Cisco's Customer Experience services, so the systems you secure carry customer inventory, vulnerability detection, and support data at Cisco scale. As a Software Engineer on the Site Reliability Engineering – Security team, you set the technical direction for how Cisco CX Engineering builds and operates secure infrastructure and developer platforms. You will design systems that are secure by default, drive Zero Trust adoption across infrastructure and internal tooling, and embed security signals into SRE observability and incident response so threats surface as quickly as outages do. You will advise engineering leadership and negotiate the trade-offs between security, velocity, and reliability on decisions that affect the entire organization. Success looks like measurably reduced attack surface, faster vulnerability remediation, and platforms that engineers can use safely by default without slowing down. This is a role for someone who wants their architectural decisions to outlive any single project.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree + 12 years of related experience, or Master's degree + 8 years of related experience, or PhD + 5 years of related experience.
- 5+ years of hands-on production experience operating and scaling at least one major cloud (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including direct ownership of cloud security posture: advanced IAM, KMS/secrets management, network controls, and CSPM or equivalent tooling.
- 3+ years building production automation and tooling in Python and/or Go applied to security use cases such as vulnerability management, secrets orchestration, compliance evidence collection, or detection integration.
- 5+ years applying SRE practices in production, including defining SLIs/SLOs, managing error budgets, serving as incident commander, and running post-mortems that drive follow-up engineering work.
- 5+ years applying security fundamentals in production environments: threat modeling, secure-by-default architecture, least-privilege and workload identity, secrets and certificate lifecycle management, and vulnerability management at scale.
Nice To Haves
- Hands-on production Kubernetes security experience: RBAC at scale, Network Policies, Pod Security Standards, admission controllers, image signing and verification, control-plane hardening, and service mesh mTLS.
- Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform) with policy-as-code (OPA, Kyverno, Checkov, tfsec), GitOps delivery (ArgoCD or Flux), and CI/CD security gates including SAST, SCA, image and secret scanning, SBOM generation, and artifact signing.
- Deep experience with security observability and runtime detection tooling (Falco, eBPF-based detection, SIEM, CSPM/CNAPP platforms) integrated with Prometheus, Grafana, or OpenTelemetry.
- Experience securing AI/ML workloads and MLOps pipelines, including training and inference pipeline security and model security, and applying AI/LLM capabilities to security automation with human-in-the-loop guardrails.
- Security certifications such as CISSP, CCSP, or AWS Certified Security – Specialty, paired with strong communication and influence skills and a track record of driving security and architectural decisions across organizational levels.
Responsibilities
- Design and build secure, scalable infrastructure and developer platforms so that security controls are embedded by default rather than bolted on later.
- Harden the platforms themselves — Kubernetes control planes, GitOps systems, CI/CD pipelines, and observability stacks — treating internal tooling as the high-value target it is.
- Drive Zero Trust at scale through workload identity, continuous verification, and micro-segmentation so access is earned rather than assumed.
- Own the reliability and security posture of critical services including secrets management, PKI, and IAM governance to keep the foundations of the environment trustworthy.
- Lead cross-team incident response and blameless post-mortems that convert both reliability and security failures into permanent fixes.
- Automate security and compliance through policy-as-code and automated evidence collection to reduce toil and shorten remediation time.
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)
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
