Principal Software Engineer
Meet the Team
The Collaboration organization at Cisco builds platforms and experiences that help engineering teams deliver software safely, consistently, and at enterprise scale. Our developer experience and GitOps platform work sits at the intersection of application engineering, cloud-native delivery, security, and operational excellence. This team develops the internal tools, services, workflows, and governance patterns that enable engineering groups to release and operate software through a unified, Git-driven model. We work across Java backend services, modern web experiences, Kubernetes and VM-based delivery, GitHub Actions, Argo CD, Vault, and related platform capabilities.
Your Impact
This role serves as a strategic leader for developer experience and GitOps within Cisco Collaboration, tasked with aligning platform architecture with critical business, security, and operational goals. You will spearhead enterprise-scale initiatives to modernize the engineering lifecycle, optimizing how teams build, deploy, and secure services across Kubernetes and VM-based environments. By defining robust reference architectures and governance models, you will standardize CI/CD automation, secrets management, and deployment visibility to drive engineering excellence.
Beyond technical design, you will act as a key advisor to senior leadership, resolving complex organizational blockers and influencing teams through mentorship and cross-functional decision-making. This position is particularly exciting because it offers the opportunity to build the future of developer efficiency by driving the adoption of AI-assisted workflows and modern delivery models. Ultimately, you will represent the platform strategy to stakeholders, ensuring that these investments deliver measurable business outcomes and improved release velocity.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree with 15+ years of relevant experience, Master’s degree with 12+ years, or PhD with 8+ years of experience in software engineering.
- 10+ years in full-stack development, including backend systems using Java or Spring Boot and frontend interfaces using React, Angular, or Vue.js.
- Production experience crafting and delivering APIs, services, and platform workflows for large-scale enterprise environments.
- Previous enterprise implementation of CI/CD pipelines and Git-based release automation using tools such as GitHub Actions.
- Ownership of architecting and handling containerized, cloud-native applications within Kubernetes and distributed system environments.
Preferred Qualifications
- Production experience with GitOps-based delivery using Argo CD or equivalent platforms.
- Experience with HashiCorp Vault or comparable secrets-management technologies.
- Experience with Helm, Kustomize, Terraform, Ansible, or other infrastructure and deployment automation tools.
- Experience supporting both Kubernetes-based and VM-based deployment models at enterprise scale.
- Breadth across platform engineering, developer experience, release engineering, security, observability, and operational readiness.
- Experience defining technical standards, reference architectures, adoption plans, and success metrics for internal developer platforms.
- Ability to anticipate business and industry changes, connect technical strategy to product outcomes, and develop innovative approaches beyond existing solutions.
- Practical experience with AI-assisted development, agentic workflows, or automation patterns that improve engineering productivity while maintaining governance and security standards.
- Strong mentoring presence and demonstrated ability to raise engineering quality across teams through influence, review, and technical guidance.
Why Cisco?
At Cisco, we’re revolutionizing how data and infrastructure connect and protect organizations in the AI era – and beyond. We’ve been innovating fearlessly for 40 years to create solutions that power how humans and technology work together across the physical and digital worlds. These solutions provide customers with unparalleled security, visibility, and insights across the entire digital footprint. Fueled by the depth and breadth of our technology, we experiment and create meaningful solutions. Add to that our worldwide network of doers and experts, and you’ll see that the opportunities to grow and build are limitless. We work as a team, collaborating with empathy to make really big things happen on a global scale. Because our solutions are everywhere, our impact is everywhere.
Pay
The starting salary range for this position is $223,100.00 to $301,100.00 for new hires 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. The full salary range for certain locations is listed below:
- New York City Metro Area: $250,600.00 - $416,900.00
- Non-Metro New York State & Washington State: $241,400.00 - $371,000.00
For quota-based sales roles on Cisco’s sales plan, the ranges provided include base pay and sales target incentive compensation combined.
Benefits
U.S. employees are offered benefits, subject to Cisco’s plan eligibility rules, which include:
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance
- 401(k) plan with a Cisco matching contribution
- Paid parental leave
- Short and long-term disability coverage
- Basic life insurance
- Eligibility to earn annual bonuses (for non-sales roles) or performance-based incentive pay (for sales roles)
- Grants of Cisco restricted stock units, which vest following continued employment with Cisco for defined periods of time
- Paid time away, including:
- 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
- 16 days of paid vacation time per full calendar year for non-exempt employees (accrued at 4.92 hours per pay period for full-time employees)
- Flexible vacation time off program for exempt employees (no defined limit, subject to availability and business limitations)
- 80 hours of sick time off provided on hire date and each January 1st thereafter, with up to 80 hours of unused sick time carried forward
- Additional paid time away for critical or emergency family issues
- Optional 10 paid days per full calendar year to volunteer