Software Engineering Tech Lead (SRE + AI)

Cisco Systems Inc; City of Westminster; On-site; GBP 110,000 - 165,000; Full time

Job summary

Cisco Systems Inc. seeks a Technical Leader to drive architectural vision for an AI-powered Production Intelligence platform, blending Site Reliability Engineering with agentic AI to monitor, diagnose, and auto-remediate global SaaS infrastructure.

You will define roadmaps, build AI agents, design robust telemetry pipelines, ensure safe automation, mentor engineers, and partner with global teams to deliver reliable software at scale.

Qualifications

• Minimum of 8 years of related experience in software engineering and site reliability engineering.
• Proven track record delivering distributed, high-availability SaaS platforms at scale.
• Strong proficiency in Python, Go, Java, or C++ with microservices and automation experience.

Responsibilities

• Define the architectural roadmap for AI-assisted observability and self-healing cloud infrastructure.
• Design and build production-grade AI agents and MCP tool integrations.
• Architect data ingestion and correlation pipelines across logs, metrics, traces, and runbooks.
• Develop safe automation with guardrails and HITL remediation workflows.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams and mentor engineers.

Skills

Python

Go

Java

C++

microservices

production automation

Education

Bachelor's degree

Master's degree

PhD

Tools

Kubernetes

Docker

OpenTelemetry

Prometheus

Grafana

Splunk

Kafka

Redis

PostgreSQL

Elasticsearch

Vector DBs

Job description

As a Technical Leader, you will drive the architectural vision and implementation of our next-generation AI-powered Production Intelligence platform. You will combine Site Reliability Engineering practices with modern agentic AI (reusable Skills, Model Context Protocol (MCP), and LLM tooling) to transform how engineering and leadership teams monitor, diagnose, and auto-remediate global SaaS infrastructure. What you'll do

• Technical Leadership & Architecture: Define the technical roadmap and architecture for AI-assisted observability, automated incident response, and self-healing cloud infrastructure.
• Agentic Workflows & Tooling: Design and build production-grade AI agents, MCP tool integrations, and deterministic evaluation pipelines for automated operational decision support.
• Telemetry & Insights: Architect ingestion and correlation pipelines across distributed logs, metrics, OpenTelemetry traces, change events, and runbooks to accelerate Mean Time to Detection (MTTD) and Resolution (MTTR).
• Safe Production Automation: Develop proactive anomaly detection and Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) remediation workflows with rigorous safety, security, and quality guardrails.
• Reliability & Scalability Engineering: Partner with application and infrastructure teams to define SLIs/SLOs, handle error budgets, and lead deep-dive post-incident reviews (PIRs).
• Mentorship & Collaboration: Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, establish engineering best practices, and drive alignment across global development and operations teams.
• You'll manage priorities and deadlines, communicate progress clearly and work across teams to turn production needs into reliable software and AI-assisted capabilities.

  Bachelor's degree + 8 years of related experience, Master's + 6 years, or PhD + 3 years in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field.

• Proven record as a Technical Lead or Lead SRE/Software Engineer delivering distributed, high-availability SaaS platforms at scale.
• Strong proficiency in Python, Go, Java, or C++ with experience designing microservices, APIs, and production automation.
• Deep experience with Kubernetes, Docker, and container orchestration in large-scale multi-cluster environments.
• Proven background in SRE practices: SLI/SLO design, observability platforms (metrics/logs/traces), incident management, and automated RCA., AI & Agentic Systems: Hands-on experience building LLM pipelines, AI Agents, Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers/clients, RAG architectures, and evaluation frameworks.
• Observability & Telemetry: Experience with OpenTelemetry (OTel), Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, ThousandEyes, or distributed tracing systems.
• Cloud & Infrastructure: Expertise in public cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure), Terraform/IaC, and GitOps/CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions).
• Safe Automation & Guardrails: Experience implementing responsible AI guardrails, deterministic fallback logic, and policy-driven remediation engines.
• Data & Messaging: Experience with streaming and data platforms (Kafka, Redis, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch/Vector DBs).

  The Collaboration Technology Group is redefining the future of teamwork, building services that connect people effortlessly across devices, locations and time zones.

Our team builds, runs and continuously improves the platform services behind Cisco's collaboration products, operating at global scale across numerous datacentres. We're a passionate, collaborative team focused on reliability, innovation and engineering excellence., 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.

Cisco is an affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity Employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, genetic information, age, disability, veteran status, or any other legally protected basis. Cisco will consider for employment, on a case by case basis, qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.