Principal Engineer - Platform Engineering

About the role

The Platform Engineering organization is responsible for building and operating the foundational cloud-native platforms that power engineering across Cisco Network Platform. Our team owns the Kubernetes ecosystem used by thousands of developers, spanning hundreds of clusters across public and on-premise environments. We provide the infrastructure, automation, observability, security, and self-service capabilities that enable product teams to build and operate services reliably at scale. This is an opportunity to shape the future of Kubernetes and platform engineering within Cisco Network Platform while influencing the experience of engineers across the company.

Responsibilities

• Arcitect and drive the evolution of Kubernetes platform strategy across cloud and on-premises environments supporting mission-critical workloads at scale.
• Lead the design and implementation of platform capabilities that improve reliability, security, scalability, and developer productivity for hundreds of engineering teams.
• Partner with engineering, security, and product leaders to define multi-year platform roadmaps and drive execution of company-critical initiatives.
• Provide technical leadership during major incidents, architecture reviews, platform transformations, and strategic infrastructure investments.
• Mentor senior engineers and help raise the engineering bar through technical leadership, design reviews, operational excellence, and architectural guidance.

Requirements

• 15+ years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems in production environments.
• 7+ years of hands-on experience operating Kubernetes platforms in production, including multi-cluster environments.
• Experience architecting and operating cloud-native infrastructure across AWS, Azure, GCP, or hybrid cloud environments.
• Experience designing, operating, and troubleshooting networking architectures for large-scale Kubernetes platforms, including CNI implementations, ingress and egress traffic management, service-to-service communication, multi-cluster connectivity, and network observability.
• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code and GitOps technologies, including Terraform and ArgoCD or equivalent platforms.
• Strong communication and leadership skills with the ability to effectively influence engineers, architects, senior leaders, and executive stakeholders.
• Proven track record leading cross-organizational platform initiatives and influencing technical strategy across multiple engineering teams.
• Experience implementing SRE practices, including SLOs, incident management, production readiness reviews, and operational excellence programs.
• Strong software engineering experience with Go, Python, or similar programming languages used for automation and platform development.

Qualifications

• Experience with migrating monolithic applications to a microservices architecture.
• Knowledge of networking (i.e. switching, routing, wifi, IoT).

Skills

• Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, and container orchestration tools.
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, GCP, or hybrid environments.
• Proficiency in scripting languages such as Bash, Python, or Go.
• Experience with monitoring and logging tools like Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack, or similar.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and automation tools like Jenkins, GitLab CI, or Spinnaker.
• Experience with DevOps practices and tools like Ansible, Terraform, or Helm.

Benefits

U.S. employees are offered benefits, subject to Cisco’s plan eligibility rules, which include 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. Please see the Cisco careers site to discover more benefits and perks.

Pay

The starting salary range posted for this position is $231,400.00 to $331,800.00 and reflects the projected salary range for new hires in this position in U.S. and/or Canada 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.

Schedule

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:

• 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
• 4 paid days off for personal wellness determined by Cisco
• 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)
• 80 hours of sick time off provided on hire date and each January 1st thereafter, and up to 80 hours of unused sick time carried forward from one calendar year to the next
• Additional paid time away may be requested to deal with critical or emergency issues for family members