Staff Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) (Hybrid)

Cisco•San Francisco, CA

4d•$186,900 - $307,800•Hybrid

About The Position

The Splunk Agent Resilience team develops scalable, cost-effective evaluation and guardrails to help ensure AI agents behave as intended, improving reliability and reducing risks. Its unified approach helps customers deploy and manage AI-powered applications with enhanced observability and control. The Staff Site Reliability Engineer will provide technical leadership for the reliability, scalability, and operational architecture of Splunk Agent Observability's platform. The role defines the long-term reliability strategy, leads major infrastructure initiatives, and drives engineering excellence across deployment automation, production operations, and platform resiliency. The engineer will own complex production systems, influence engineering direction across teams, and establish best practices for operating large-scale cloud and on-premises deployments. This is a hybrid position requiring approximately two days per week on-site at Cisco offices in San Francisco and San Jose, or New York City. The application window is expected to close on October 31, 2026. The posted starting salary range for new hires in U.S. and/or Canada locations is $186,900 to $267,700, excluding incentive compensation, equity, and benefits. Pay depends on hiring location and factors such as skills, experience, qualifications, education, certifications, and training. Cisco offers eligible U.S. employees benefits and paid time away subject to plan eligibility and company policies.

Requirements

At least 8 years of experience with a bachelor's degree, 6 or more years with a master's degree, or 3 or more years with a Ph.D., or equivalent related experience.
At least 6 years in Site Reliability Engineering, Platform, Cloud, Infrastructure Engineering, or related fields.
At least 5 years operating large-scale Kubernetes platforms in production.
Experience designing highly available, scalable, and resilient distributed systems.
Experience with AWS, GCP, or other public cloud platforms.
Strong experience designing CI/CD platforms and deployment automation at scale.

Nice To Haves

Expertise in observability, monitoring, alerting, capacity planning, and performance engineering.
Strong programming skills in Python and/or Go.
Deep experience with Infrastructure as Code, such as Terraform.
MLOps experience.
Strong understanding of networking, distributed systems, storage, databases, and cloud architecture.
Experience operating both SaaS and enterprise/on-premises deployments.
Demonstrated technical leadership across multiple engineering teams.
Experience leading incident management, postmortems, and long-term reliability initiatives.

Responsibilities

Define and drive the technical roadmap for platform reliability, scalability, and operational excellence.
Lead the architecture and evolution of deployment platforms supporting cloud and air-gapped customer environments.
Establish reliability engineering standards, including service level objectives (SLOs), operational readiness, capacity planning, and resiliency reviews.
Lead major reliability and scalability initiatives across Kubernetes, deployment infrastructure, databases, and networking.
Drive automation to eliminate operational toil and improve engineering productivity.
Design and build internal platforms, frameworks, and tooling that enable reliable operations at scale.
Lead complex production incident response and drive systemic improvements through root cause analysis and long-term remediation.
Partner with engineering leadership to influence platform architecture, deployment strategy, and production readiness.
Mentor engineers and raise the engineering bar through technical leadership, design reviews, and operational guidelines.
Collaborate with customers and internal teams to build secure, scalable, and highly reliable deployment architectures for cloud and on-premises environments.

Benefits

Medical insurance
Dental insurance
Vision insurance
401(k) plan with Cisco matching contribution
Paid parental leave
Short- and long-term disability coverage
Basic life insurance
Cisco restricted stock unit grants may be available, subject to continued employment and vesting conditions
10 paid holidays per full calendar year
One floating holiday for non-exempt employees
Paid birthday day off
Paid year-end holiday shutdown
Four paid personal wellness days
Non-exempt employees receive 16 days of paid vacation per full calendar year, accrued at the stated rate for full-time employees
Exempt employees participate in a flexible vacation time off program, subject to availability and business limitations
80 hours of sick time off provided on hire date and each January 1, with up to 80 hours of unused sick time carried forward
Additional paid time away may be requested for critical or emergency family issues
Optional 10 paid volunteer days per full calendar year
Annual bonuses may be available for non-sales roles, subject to Cisco policies