Software Engineering Tech Lead (SRE + AI)

Cisco Systems, Inc.; Greater London; On-site; GBP 130,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Cisco is seeking a Technical Leader to drive architectural vision for an AI-powered Production Intelligence platform. You will blend Site Reliability Engineering with agentic AI to improve monitoring, diagnosis, and auto-remediation across global SaaS infrastructure.

You will lead architecture, mentor engineers, and partner across teams to deliver reliable software and AI-assisted capabilities with strong safety and quality guardrails.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree plus 8 years of related experience, Master’s plus 6 years, or PhD plus 3 years in CS/Software Eng.
• Proven record as Technical Lead or Lead SRE delivering distributed SaaS at scale.
• Strong proficiency in Python, Go, Java, or C++ with microservices exp.

Responsibilities

• Define tech roadmap and architecture for AI-assisted observability and self-healing cloud infra.
• Design AI agents, MCP integrations, and deterministic evaluation pipelines.

Skills

Technical Leadership

SRE Practices

Kubernetes

AI/LLM

Programming Languages

Education

Bachelor’s +8y

Master’s +6y

PhD +3y

Tools

Kubernetes

Docker

APIs/Microservices

CI/CD

Observability Tools

Job description

Meet the Team

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.

Your impact

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.

Minimum qualifications

• 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.

Preferred Qualifications

• 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).

CollabHiring

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.