Software Engineering Technical Leader - SRE + Kubernetes + Cloud + Automation + Incident Management + AI-first (10-14 Years)

Meet the Team Cisco’s Collaboration Business Unit empowers people and organizations worldwide to connect, communicate, and innovate seamlessly. You will collaborate with a global team of software engineers and SREs responsible for delivering extraordinary collaboration experiences at scale. Our team supports backend services deployed worldwide and works closely with development, product, and operations partners to ensure reliability and performance. Webex is powering the shift to the hybrid workforce, helping people stay connected in a rapidly evolving digital world. We cultivate a startup-like culture that values innovation, ownership, and collaboration, while offering the scale and impact of a global technology leader.

From a reliability standpoint, this role involves evaluating the scalability, resiliency, performance, and security properties and techniques used in production environments. It supports the uptime of production services through an On-Call rotation, which includes monitoring and alerting to meet internal Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and customer-facing Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Ensuring reliable incident processes is achieved by conducting Disaster Recovery drills. The role also focuses on improving reliability through incident management by investigating incidents, implementing remediation strategies, and learning from past incidents to make improvements. It involves determining the reliability and security requirements of components and systems to meet the reliability objectives of the company, customers, and any relevant governmental agencies. Additionally, the role aims to reduce operational expenses through automation, by identifying and mitigating failure points, and automating repetitive and resource-intensive tasks. It also involves developing new acceleration techniques and analytical tools to ensure the early identification of potential issues with new products, packaging, processes, and overall product reliability. Specifically: Own the deployment and operation of critical collaboration services across cloud and hybrid environments, driving reliability and scalability. Design, evolve, and optimize CI/CD pipelines and automation, including AI‑first tooling for deployment, monitoring, and incident response. Lead incident response for complex production issues, perform root cause analysis, and drive systemic reliability and performance improvements. Use observability data to guide capacity planning, scaling strategies, and resource optimization across services. Define and champion operational best practices, documentation standards, and a culture of reliability and operational excellence.

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience) with 7 –13 years  in Site Reliability Engineering, Cloud Operations, or Systems Engineering. Strong hands-on experience operating production services using  Docker and Kubernetes  in cloud or hybrid environments. Proficiency in  one or more programming or scripting languages  (e.g., Python, Go, Bash) to build automation and operational tooling. Experience with  monitoring, observability, and incident response  in production environments, including on-call participation and post-incident reviews. Working knowledge of  Linux systems, networking, distributed systems, CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, and Git-based workflows .

Experience operating large-scale, globally distributed SaaS platforms. Familiarity with hybrid cloud environments and multi-region deployments. Experience applying AI-assisted or automation-first approaches to SRE tooling and workflows. Strong written communication skills for creating clear operational documentation and runbooks. 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