Principal Engineer - Platform Engineering

Kubernetes Platform Architect

The successful applicant may be performing work in FedRAMP High or IL-5 environments, and therefore, must be a U.S. Person (i.e. U.S. citizen, U.S. national, lawful permanent resident, asylee, or refugee). This position may also perform work that the U.S. government has specified can only be performed by a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil.

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  are a highly collaborative team of SREs who enjoy solving complex distributed systems challenges.

Our culture emphasizes ownership, operational excellence, automation, and continuous improvement. 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.

Architect and drive the evolution of Kubernetes platform strategy across cloud and on-premises environments supporting mission-critical workloads d 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.

• 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 Git Ops technologies, including Terraform and ArgoCD or equivalent platforms.
• 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.

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

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.

The starting salary range posted for this position is $ to $ and reflects the…