Kubernetes Platform Lead - SRE & Cloud Reliability

Cisco Systems, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 210,000 - 320,000; Full time

Job summary

Cisco Systems, Inc. is seeking a senior Platform Engineer to lead the design, implementation, and optimization of our Kubernetes platform across cloud and on‑prem environments, supporting mission‑critical workloads at scale.

You will drive reliability, security, scalability, and developer productivity using Infrastructure-as-Code and GitOps, partner with engineering, security, and product teams to execute roadmaps, and mentor senior engineers to raise the engineering bar.

Qualifications

• 12+ years designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems in production.
• 7+ years operating Kubernetes platforms in production with multi-cluster environments.
• Experience designing and troubleshooting networking for large Kubernetes platforms (CNI, service mesh).
• IaC and GitOps experience, specifically Terraform and ArgoCD.
• SRE practices: SLOs/SLIs, incident mgmt, production readiness reviews, automated remediation.
• Strong communication and leadership skills to influence engineers and executives.

Responsibilities

• Lead design, implementation, and optimization of Kubernetes platform capabilities across cloud and on-prem environments.
• Drive initiatives to improve reliability, security, scalability, and developer productivity via IaC and GitOps.
• Partner with engineering, security, and product teams to execute platform roadmaps and reliability goals.
• Provide technical leadership during major incidents and architecture reviews.
• Mentor senior engineers and raise engineering standards through reviews and automation.

Skills

Kubernetes platforms

SRE practices

Leadership

Go

Python

Ruby

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

Terraform

ArgoCD

Job description

Cisco Systems, Inc. is seeking a senior Platform Engineer to lead the design, implementation, and optimization of our Kubernetes platform across cloud and on‑prem environments, supporting mission‑critical workloads at scale.

You will drive reliability, security, scalability, and developer productivity using Infrastructure-as-Code and GitOps, partner with engineering, security, and product teams to execute roadmaps, and mentor senior engineers to raise the engineering bar.