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 and cloud-native infrastructure.
• Strong communication and leadership skills.
• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code and GitOps technologies.
• Experience with SRE practices and tools.
• Software engineering experience with relevant programming languages.

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 On Sales Plans Earn Performance-based Incentive Pay On Top Of Their Base Salary, Which Is Split Between Quota And Non-quota Components, Subject To The Applicable Cisco Plan. For Quota-based Incentive Pay, Cisco Typically Pays As Follows .75% of incentive target for each 1% of revenue attainment up to 50% of quota;1.5% of incentive target for each 1% of attainment between 50% and 75%;1% of incentive target for each 1% of attainment between 75% and 100%; andOnce performance exceeds 100% attainment, incentive rates are at or above 1% for each 1% of attainment with no cap on incentive compensation. For non-quota-based sales performance elements such as strategic sales objectives, Cisco may pay 0% up to 125% of target.