Software Engineering Technical Leader, Backend Services - Isovalent

Cisco Systems, Inc; Zürich; On-site; CHF 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Cisco Systems, Inc is seeking a Technical Lead for backend services in Zürich. You will guide a team of engineers to build scalable, secure workload protection solutions and contribute architectural leadership across distributed systems. The role focuses on performance, reliability, and policy-driven enforcement in complex environments.

You will drive telemetry collection, design low-latency APIs, and navigate large-scale data processing while collaborating across product and security teams.

Qualifications

• 9+ years of software development experience in Go, C++, or Java.
• Technical leadership experience in a software engineering environment.
• Experience with Agile methodologies.
• Bachelor's degree with 11+ years, Master's 9+ years, PhD 4+ years, or equivalent; 10 years if no degree.

Responsibilities

• Lead backend services with a focus on scale, performance, reliability and security.
• Provide architectural leadership to a team of engineers delivering secure workloads.
• Collect and process telemetry at scale from customer environments.
• Implement API endpoints with minimal latency for large data volumes.

Skills

Go

C++

Java

Technical leadership

Agile

Education

Bachelor's degree + 11+ years experience

Master's degree + 9+ years

PhD + 4+ years

Equivalent combination of education

Tools

Kubernetes

Cloud APIs (AWS/Azure/GCP)

Job description

Meet the Team

Isovalent, now part of Cisco, is the company founded by the creators of Cilium and eBPF. Cisco Secure Workload is a flagship security product offering workload protection, micro-segmentation, and is part of the Hybrid Mesh Firewall solution. Cisco Isovalent and Cisco Secure Workload are together building the next generation of products for securing workloads and AI infrastructure.

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

We are a highly dynamic engineering organization that works on building software for workload security products that cater to highly complex and scalable customer environments to protect their crown jewel application workloads from increasingly complex threat vectors.

As a Technical Lead for backend services, you will work with and provide technical leadership to a team of highly motivated engineers working on solutions to ship or deploy for our customers, with a focus on improving Scale, Performance, Reliability, Robustness, and, most importantly, Security.

In this role you’ll provide technical leadership and make architectural contributions in backend services that:

• Collect and process telemetry at scale from data sources in customer environments.

• React to changes in environment and render policies in highly scalable manner to large number of enforcement points.

• Implement API endpoints that need to respond with minimal latencies even when crunching large volumes of data.

• Will be deployed in highly complex distributed system environments and involve failure modes unique to those environments.

Minimum Qualifications

• At least 9+ years' experience building software systems in one or more programming languages such as Go, C++, or Java.

• Technical leadership experience in a software engineering environment

• Agile experience

• Bachelor's degree with 11+ years of related experience, Master's with 9+ years, PhD with 4+ years, or equivalent combination of education and experience. In lieu of a degree, a minimum of 10 years of relevant professional experience

Preferred Qualifications

• Proficiency in Computer Science foundational areas, including algorithms, systems, databases, performance engineering and security architecture

• Schema/Data modeling design experience

• Experience with large-scale event processing architectures

• Experience in systems programming and performance engineering

• Experience working with security architecture and database design

• Kubernetes experience

• Experience programming using cloud APIs for AWS, Azure, or GCP

• A professional who embraces agile methodologies that involve rapid prototyping by feedback gathered from customers, peers and technical solution architects, customer enablement engineers and support engineers.

• A technically skilled leader who enjoys architecting, designing, analyzing, and brainstorming solutions that improve the product and produce customer-facing capabilities

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 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.

We are Cisco, and our power starts with you.