Technical Leader, Performance Engineering - Tetragon

The application window is expected to close on: 06/23/2026

Job posting may be removed earlier if the position is filled or if a sufficient number of applications are received.

Meet the Team

Isovalent, now part of Cisco, is the company founded by the creators of Cilium and eBPF. Cisco Isovalent builds open-source software and enterprise solutions solving networking, security, and observability needs for modern cloud native infrastructure. The flagship technologies, Cilium and Tetragon, are the choice of numerous, industry-leading, global organizations.

We believe in fostering an inclusive and diverse workplace where every team member feels valued, respected, and empowered. We believe that every employee contributes to our success, and we are committed to fostering an environment where everyone can thrive. We encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply and join us in our mission to deliver exceptional products and services.

Your Impact

Tetragon is a flexible, Kubernetes-aware observability and security tool that delivers real-time insights and enforcement. Leveraging the power of eBPF, Tetragon provides low-overhead, in-kernel visibility and intelligence across diverse environments.

As a Technical Leader, you will be at the forefront of advancing Tetragon's capabilities. You will guide architectural direction while staying deeply engaged in building the systems that power our platform. Your impact will allow Tetragon to be used on resource constraint platforms as well as scale its capabilities to meet the increasing demands of security protection across a variety of platforms.

You will collaborate closely with teams across Cisco to understand different use-cases and optimize Tetragon to meet different requirements. In this role, you'll solve some of the most complex system-level challenges in observability and infrastructure, helping Tetragon evolve to meet the needs of the modern runtime security landscape.

What you'll do:

* Develop high-quality Go (and eBPF) code for the Tetragon project.

* Understand and analyze Tetragon's performance and overheads

* Design and implement novel ways to minimize Tetragon's CPU overhead and memory footprint

* Partner across teams to align requirements, define integration points, and deliver production-ready solutions.

* Contribute to open-source projects and represent Cisco Isovalent in community discussions.

* Participate in architecture reviews, code reviews, and documentation.

Minimum Qualifications

* Bachelors + 8 years of related experience, or Masters + 6 years of related experience, or PhD + 3 years of related experience

* 8+ years of experience in systems programming (C, Go, or similar; Tetragon is primarily written in Go).

* Experience in any of these areas:
Linux systems, Kernel-level development or eBPF programming for observability or security use cases, or experience in building scalable Go systems.

* Experience in performance analysis and optimization.

Preferred Qualifications

* Experience in analyzing and improving the performance and memory consumption of eBPF and Go programs.

* Experience in debugging and optimization with a track record of delivering scalable systems.

* Knowledge of eBPF for observability or security use cases.

* Solid background in Linux systems and kernel-level concepts.

* Familiarity with Kubernetes and cloud-native environments.

* Exposure to real-time streaming/aggregation systems and database performance optimization.

* Contributions to open-source projects in networking, observability, or distributed systems.

* Experience working across diverse, distributed teams.

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 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…