Technical Lead, Network Engineering

The application window is expected to close on: 11/29/2026 Meet the Team

This team builds and supports networking products leveraging Cisco IOS-XR and open-source technologies, operating at the intersection of systems and silicon. The environment spans hyper-scale data centers, cloud infrastructure, and highly distributed systems where reliability, scalability, and customer outcomes are critical.

The team combines deep platform and networking expertise with modern automation and data-driven approaches, including AI-assisted workflows, to accelerate issue resolution and improve product behavior in production. This role sits at the center of customer engagement, production support, and engineering collaboration, serving as a key bridge between customers and internal teams.

Your Impact

You will play a critical role in strengthening the team’s ability to build, deploy, and troubleshoot large-scale datacenter and cloud networking environments while scaling operational excellence through automation and intelligent tooling. You will:

• Serve as a technical focal point for customer solutions, translating real-world constraints into scalable, supportable designs and operational models.

• Partner closely with engineering teams to troubleshoot and resolve complex issues across datacenter and cloud networking stacks, establishing repeatable diagnostics and clear escalation paths.

• Support high-priority customers on deep, cross-layer issues, driving problems to root cause with data-backed analysis and clear technical narratives.

• Apply hyper-scale operational best practices, including telemetry, alerting, and workflow automation, to improve mean time to detect and resolve issues.

• Develop and maintain Python-based tools to parse, correlate, and visualize operational data, and leverage AI/ML or LLM-based approaches where appropriate for log analysis, triage, and summarization.

• Bachelor's degree + 8 years of related experience, or Masters + 6 years of related experience, or PhD + 3 years of related experience, or equivalent related work experience.

• Experience with routing and switching technologies in production environments or advanced lab settings.

• Experience working with structured data and operational telemetry, including experience with time-series concepts, anomaly detection, or similar analytical approaches.

• Experience with Python (or another programming language) including building automation, parsing workflows, and troubleshooting tools (beyond basic scripting).

• Experience with AI-assisted tools or workflows in engineering environments, including safe and effective use of GenAI or LLM-based APIs for operational support.

• Familiarity with Open Config (OC) paths for network configuration, state retrieval, and telemetry.

• Work with YANG data models and understand the hierarchy and structure of Open Config paths.

• Implement and troubleshoot configuration and telemetry workflows using protocols such as gNMI

• Strong Linux experience supporting lab, tooling, or production-adjacent environments.

• Background in system architecture, deployment engineering, or field engineering within Tier-1 enterprise or hyperscale environments.

• Familiarity with open-source and network operating systems such as SONiC, IOS-XR, or FBOSS.

• Experience with network testing and validation tools such as Ixia, Spirent, or similar platforms.

• Solid understanding of networking fundamentals including L2/L3, VXLAN, and security services such as MACsec.

• Proven ability to troubleshoot and perform root cause analysis in large-scale, multi-vendor environments.

• Experience supporting high-priority or escalated customer issues, with the ability to lead technically during critical situations.

Why Cisco? At Cisco, we’re…