Technical Leader, Site Reliability Engineer

About the role

The Persistence Team is a foundational component of the Cisco Collaboration Suite. We provide Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) at a large scale, managing distributed data footprints globally across private datacenters and AWS. We are responsible for the deployment, reliable operations, and resilience of the technology that powers the entire Cisco Collaboration Suite.

Responsibilities

• Architect & Deploy: Design and implement large-scale solutions for Cassandra, Kafka, and OpenSearch across hybrid environments (AWS & Private Cloud).
• Automate Everything: Lead cloud engineering projects using Terraform, Ansible, and Kubernetes to improve service reliability and deployment velocity.
• Scale & Optimize: Lead capacity planning and performance tuning for high-throughput production systems.
• Ensure Integrity: Manage automated workflows for backups, security patching, and incident management with a focus on quality assurance in live environments.
• Stakeholder Leadership: Act as a consultant to application teams, guiding them on data access patterns and cloud migration strategies.

Requirements

• 8+ years hands on experience (deploy, monitor, scale, and upgrades) with distributed database technology such as CassandraDB, Opensearch, Kafka, PostgreSQL
• 5+ Years managing AWS infrastructure at scale
• 5+ Years experience with infrastructure automation and DevOps practices such as CI/CD tools (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI) and Infrastructure as Code tools (Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes)
• Python experience
• 5+ years experience supporting live production systems for customer facing software as a service
• 3+ years of experience leading technical projects, including responsibility for task estimation, milestone tracking, and stakeholder communication processes

Qualifications

• Distributed big data enthusiast
• Passionate about building resilient infrastructure
• Solving complex "stateful" problems in a "stateless" world

Skills

• Experience with modern data platforms including data pipelines, streaming systems, AL/ML and GenAI workloads
• Experience writing data driven applications in Java or Python
• Familiarity with data access patterns in software
• Experience in regulated US Federal environments

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 $186,900.00 to $267,700.00 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
• Optional 10 paid days per full calendar year to volunteer