Platform Engineer

Join the Cisco Global SE Demo Team building a new global platform to enable sales, partners and customers to run demonstrations from the same multi-tenant infrastructure. You will work hands‑on across Linux, Kubernetes, automation and day‑2 operations. This role owns cluster lifecycle, node networking, storage, CI/CD, and the APIs other teams will use to create virtual machines, networks, and related lab environments for demonstrations, labs, and training on our platform.

We work as a small hands‑on engineering and design team at the core of the platform and we share ownership and reliability across upgrades, incidents and capacity planning with the operations team. Your Impact

• Build, upgrade, and operate production Kubernetes clusters, including on‑premises and bare‑metal environments.
• Own cluster fundamentals, including Linux nodes, networking, ingress, storage, RBAC, and security baselines.
• Run Kube Virt in production, including VM lifecycle, templates, scheduling, live migration, and disk attach.
• Enable additional networks for VMs beyond the default pod network, including isolation between tenants or environments.
• Integrate the cluster with data‑centre networking and storage (CSI), including snapshot and clone workflows for VM disks.
• Automate infrastructure and cluster lifecycle using Infrastructure as Code (Terraform and/or Ansible) and Git Ops (Argo CD or Flux).
• Contribute to Kubernetes APIs used by the product (operators, CRDs, admission, or similar) so VMs and networks can be automated without manual node changes.
• Package and standardise deployments with Helm as reusable templates.
• Implement monitoring, logging, and alerting (for example Prometheus and Grafana) and help define SLIs/SLOs for cluster and VM operations.
• Fix across Linux, KVM/QEMU, Kubernetes, networking, and storage, and support incident response with the operations team when required.
• Partner with the operations team on monitoring, alerting, and capacity planning.
• Document how the platform is built, operated, and used. Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field and 4+ years of experience in platform engineering, Dev Ops, SRE, or Linux systems engineering (or equivalent work experience).
• Strong Linux administration and troubleshoting experience (RHEL-family or similar), including host networking such as bridging, VLANs or equivalent, bonding, and MTU.
• Experience operating Kubernetes in production, including upgrades, debugging, and day‑2 operations.
• Experience with Linux virtualization (KVM/QEMU, Kube Virt, Open Shift Virtualization, or similar), including VM lifecycle, not containers only.
• Experience with Kubernetes networking and persistent storage (CNI, CSI, PVCs).
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform and/or Ansible).
• Experience with Git plus CI/CD and/or Git Ops (Argo CD, Flux, or similar).
• Scripting or automation experience in Python, Go, and/or Bash., Production experience with Kube Virt or Open Shift Virtualization, including live migration, CDI/Data Volumes, and instance types.
• Experience with Multus (or equivalent) and multi‑homed VMs, including tenant or environment isolation on L2/L3.
• Experience with operators, CRDs, or admission webhooks, treating the platform as an API rather than cluster install only.
• Experience with CSI snapshot/clone, template libraries, or high‑churn VM disk provisioning.
• Traditional hypervisor background (VMware, KVM) and/or experience moving VM estates onto Kubernetes.
• Experience with Cluster API, Rancher, Open Shift, or another Kubernetes lifecycle tool.
• Observability experience with Prometheus, Grafana, Loki/ELK, or Open Telemetry.
• Experience with policy and security, including Network Policy, admission control, and secrets management.
• CKA, CKAD, CKS, or…