Customer Reliability Engineer, Hypershield (remote)

About the role

The Customer Reliability Engineering team is the deep technical escalation tier for Cisco Hypershield on the Cisco Nexus N9300 Series Smart Switches. The team owns the hardest break/fix and reliability cases escalated by Cisco TAC, applying Site Reliability Engineering practices across the full stack: the data-center fabric and the on-premises Kubernetes controller that manages the security policy enforced on it.

Responsibilities

• Own Hypershield cases escalated from Cisco TAC through to resolution, engaging customers directly as the incident requires
• Diagnose complex production failures through the Hypershield surface: the N9300 Smart Switch fabric and the on-premises Kubernetes controller that manages its security policy
• Localize faults across the layered architecture: switching and forwarding, security services and enforcement, and the control plane
• Develop a deep understanding of each customer's architecture and configuration, and diagnose failures in unfamiliar production environments
• Reproduce customer failures, partner with engineering to drive fixes, and own the fix back to the customer
• Convert individual cases into systemic improvements: runbooks, diagnostics, knowledge-base content, and product feedback to engineering
• Help build the team's proactive view of customer health, developing new monitoring, tooling, and reliability practices as the installed base grows

Requirements

• Bachelor's + 8 years of experience, Master's + 6 years, or equivalent industry experience
• Experience supporting enterprise customers in an escalation capacity, including diagnosing and resolving complex production incidents under SLA pressure in unfamiliar environments
• Experience operating and troubleshooting Cisco Nexus / NX-OS in production; equivalent depth on another major vendor accepted
• Prior experience to localize failures across a layered data-center architecture spanning switching/forwarding, services/enforcement, and control-plane domains
• Linux operations experience at the command line, including production troubleshooting, with working exposure to containers or Kubernetes

Qualifications

• Direct experience using network troubleshooting tooling as a primary diagnostic method, including packet capture and flow-telemetry analysis (NetFlow/IPFIX)
• Working knowledge of enterprise virtualization, sufficient to troubleshoot a VM-based appliance deployment; vSphere is the current deployment target
• Operational Kubernetes and Helm proficiency, including diagnosing failures beyond the workload level: TLS certificates and service-account authentication, API-server connectivity, service exposure, persistent storage for stateful workloads, and custom resources and operators
• Familiarity with the NetOps/NetSecOps operating split in data-center security
• Demonstrated ability to communicate incident status, root cause, and remediation clearly to both technical and executive audiences, verbally and in writing

Skills

• Deep networking expertise
• Strong troubleshooting skills
• Customer-facing experience
• Passion for improving reliability across complex product environments

Benefits

At Cisco, we offer competitive salaries, comprehensive benefits, and a supportive work environment. The starting salary range for this position is $158,200.00 to $200,700.00, reflecting the projected salary range for new hires in U.S. and/or Canadian locations, not including incentive compensation, equity, or benefits. Individual pay is determined by the candidate's hiring location, market conditions, job-related skillset, experience, qualifications, education, certifications, and/or training.

For locations not listed, the recruiter can share more details about compensation for the role during the hiring process. U.S. employees are offered benefits, including medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) plan with a Cisco matching contribution, paid parental leave, short and long-term disability coverage, and basic life insurance. Additional paid time off includes 10 paid holidays, 1 floating holiday for non-exempt employees, a paid day off for employee's birthday, paid year-end holiday shutdown, and 4 paid days off for personal wellness. Non-exempt employees receive 16 days of paid vacation time per full calendar year, accrued at a rate of 4.92 hours per pay period for full-time employees. Exempt employees participate in Cisco’s flexible vacation time off program, which has no defined limit on how much vacation time eligible employees may use (subject to availability and some business limitations).

Employees may be eligible to receive grants of Cisco restricted stock units, which vest following continued employment with Cisco for defined periods of time. U.S. employees are eligible for paid time away as described below, subject to Cisco’s policies. For quota-based sales roles on Cisco’s sales plan, the ranges provided in this posting include base pay and sales target incentive compensation combined. Employees in Illinois, whether exempt or non-exempt, will participate in a unique time off program to meet local requirements.