Senior Site Reliability Engineer - Observability

Cisco Systems, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 168,000 - 245,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical benefits

401(k) matching

Parental leave

Life insurance

Job summary

Cisco Systems, Inc. is seeking an experienced Site Reliability Engineer to design, deploy, and operate enterprise observability platforms across logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting for large-scale cloud infrastructure.

You will lead efforts to improve visibility, reduce MTTD/MTTR, and strengthen reliability while supporting Kubernetes-based workloads and on-call incident response within a shared SRE pager. Strong collaboration with cross-functional teams is required.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, Platform Engineering, DevOps, or related field.
• Experience administering Splunk Enterprise or Splunk Cloud in a production environment.
• Solid understanding of Splunk SPL and production dashboards, alerts, analytics.
• Experience designing, deploying, operating Elasticsearch/ELK-based platforms.
• Experience with Prometheus, Grafana, Grafana Tempo, OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing, Kafka.
• Demonstrated experience implementing modern observability strategies across logs, metrics, traces.
• Experience with Terraform and Infrastructure as Code practices.
• Strong understanding of Linux, networking, distributed systems, high availability, production operations.
• Programming or scripting in Python, Go, Ruby, Bash, or similar.
• Experience troubleshooting production incidents and on-call/ops model.
• Strong communication, collaboration, problem-solving skills.

Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, operate, and continuously improve enterprise observability platforms.
• Build and maintain Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud infrastructure and integrations.
• Deploy and operate large-scale Elasticsearch clusters for log analytics and troubleshooting.
• Design, deploy, and support tracing platforms using Grafana Tempo and OpenTelemetry.
• Build and maintain telemetry pipelines for logs, metrics, traces.
• Define instrumentation standards, data quality, retention policies, observability patterns.
• Scale and optimize Prometheus, Grafana, Kafka, Tempo, OpenTelemetry, and related systems.
• Develop dashboards, alerts, analytics, and trace visualizations (Splunk SPL, Grafana, Kibana, Tempo).
• Establish monitoring/alerting standards to improve visibility and MTTR.
• Automate provisioning, configuration, upgrades, and operational processes with Terraform and other IaC tools.
• Participate in capacity planning, performance tuning, upgrades, DR, and readiness reviews.
• Troubleshoot complex distributed-systems issues and lead/root-cause analysis.
• Collaborate with platform, application, security, DB, and network teams to improve reliability.
• Contribute to shared SRE standards, runbooks, and engineering best practices.
• Participate in on-call rotation for production services.

Skills

SRE experience

Splunk admin

SPL proficiency

Elasticsearch

Prometheus/Grafana

Terraform IaC

Linux/Networking

Programming (Python/Go)

Incident response

On-call reliability

Tools

Splunk Enterprise/Cloud

Elasticsearch

Kibana

Grafana Tempo/OpenTelemetry

Kafka

Kubernetes

Terraform

Ansible

Job description

The application window is expected to close on: 12/17/2026

Meet the Team

Join the Observability team within Cloud Network Platform Engineering's Site Reliability Engineering organization. You will help design, build, and operate enterprise observability platforms for logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting across large-scale cloud infrastructure.

This role will contribute to customer-facing production services, with an initial focus on Kubernetes-based platform workloads such as Nextunnel and broader SRE and reliability initiatives over time. You will lead efforts that improve visibility, reduce time to detect and resolve incidents, increase platform reliability, and strengthen operational excellence across Cisco's cloud environment.

The role includes participation in a shared SRE pager and on-call rotation, production support, and incident response.

Your Impact

• Design, deploy, operate, and continuously improve enterprise observability platforms.
• Build and maintain Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud infrastructure, including indexers, Search Head Clusters, heavy forwarders, deployment servers, and related integrations.
• Deploy and operate large-scale Elasticsearch clusters supporting log analytics, search, and operational troubleshooting.
• Design, deploy, and support distributed tracing platforms using Grafana Tempo and OpenTelemetry.
• Build and maintain end-to-end telemetry pipelines for logs, metrics, and traces.
• Define instrumentation standards, data quality practices, retention policies, and observability patterns.
• Scale and optimize Prometheus, Grafana, Kafka, Tempo, OpenTelemetry, and related monitoring systems.
• Develop dashboards, alerts, analytics, and trace visualizations using Splunk SPL, Grafana, Kibana, and Tempo.
• Establish monitoring and alerting standards that improve service-level visibility and reduce mean time to detect and resolve incidents.
• Automate infrastructure provisioning, configuration, upgrades, and operational processes using Terraform and configuration management tools.
• Participate in capacity planning, performance tuning, upgrades, patching, disaster recovery, and production readiness reviews.
• Troubleshoot complex distributed-systems issues and lead or support incident response and root-cause analysis.
• Partner with platform, application, security, database, and network engineering teams to improve reliability and operational consistency.
• Contribute to shared SRE standards, documentation, runbooks, and engineering best practices.
• Participate in the shared SRE pager and on-call rotation for production services.

Minimum Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, Platform Engineering, DevOps, or a related field.
• Experience administering Splunk Enterprise or Splunk Cloud in a production environment.
• Solid understanding of Splunk SPL and experience developing production dashboards, alerts, and analytics.
• Experience designing, deploying, and operating Elasticsearch or ELK-based platforms.
• Experience with Prometheus, Grafana, Grafana Tempo, OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing, and Kafka.
• Demonstrated experience implementing and operating modern observability strategies across logs, metrics, and traces.
• Experience with Terraform and Infrastructure as Code practices.
• Strong understanding of Linux, networking, distributed systems, high availability, and production operations.
• Programming or scripting experience in Python, Go, Ruby, Bash, or a similar language.
• Experience troubleshooting production incidents and working within an on-call or operational support model.
• Strong communication, collaboration, and problem-solving skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Splunk certification.
• Experience with Kubernetes and containerized production workloads.
• Experience operating cloud infrastructure in AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Experience with Ansible, Consul, CI/CD pipelines, or service mesh technologies.
• Experience with reliability engineering practices, including SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, capacity planning, and incident management.
• Experience supporting FedRAMP, government, or other regulated environments.
• Experience building secure, highly available, and compliant observability platforms.
• Experience leading cross-functional technical initiatives from proposal through implementation.
  

Technology Stack

Splunk Enterprise, Splunk Cloud, Elasticsearch, ELK, Kibana, Prometheus, Grafana, Grafana Tempo, OpenTelemetry, Kafka, Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible, AWS, Azure, GCP, Python, Go, Bash, CI/CD, distributed tracing, and cloud-native infrastructure.

US Requirement

The successful applicant may perform work in FedRAMP High or IL-5 environments and therefore must be a U.S. Person (U.S. citizen or U.S. national). Work must be performed from within the United States.

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.

Message to applicants applying to work in the U.S. and/or Canada:

The starting salary range posted for this position is $167,700.00 to $245,200.00 and reflects the projected salary range for new hires in this position in U.S. and/or Canada locations, not including incentive compensation*, equity, or benefits.

Individual pay is determined by the candidate's hiring location, market conditions, job-related skillset, experience, qualifications, education, certifications, and/or training. The full salary range for certain locations is listed below. For locations not listed below, the recruiter can share more details about compensation for the role in your location during the hiring process.

U.S. employees are offered benefits, subject to Cisco's plan eligibility rules, which include medical, dental and vision insurance, a 401(k) plan with a Cisco matching contribution, paid parental leave, short and long-term disability coverage, and basic life insurance. Please see the Cisco careers site to discover more benefits and perks. Employees may be eligible to receive grants of Cisco restricted stock units, which vest following continued employment with Cisco for defined periods of time.

U.S. employees are eligible for paid time away as described below, subject to Cisco's policies:

• 10 paid holidays per full calendar year, plus 1 floating holiday for non-exempt employees

• 1 paid day off for employee's birthday, paid year-end holiday shutdown, and 4 paid days off for personal wellness determined by Cisco

• Non-exempt employees** receive 16 days of paid vacation time per full calendar year, accrued at rate of 4.92 hours per pay period for full-time employees

• Exempt employees participate in Cisco's flexible vacation time off program, which has no defined limit on how much vacation time eligible employees may use (subject to availability and some business limitations)

• 80 hours of sick time off provided on hire date and each January 1st thereafter, and up to 80 hours ofunused sick timecarried forwardfrom one calendar yearto the next

• Additional paid time away may be requested to deal with critical or emergency issues for family members

• Optional 10 paid days per full calendar year to volunteer

For non-sales roles, employees are also eligible to earn annual bonuses subject to Cisco's policies.

Employees on sales plans earn performance-based incentive pay on top of their base salary, which is split between quota and non-quota components, subject to the applicable Cisco plan. For quota-based incentive pay, Cisco typically pays as follows:

• .75% of incentive target for each 1% of revenue attainment up to 50% of quota;

• 1.5% of incentive target for each 1% of attainment between 50% and 75%;

• 1% of incentive target for each 1% of attainment between 75% and 100%; and

• Once performance exceeds 100% attainment, incentive rates are at or above 1% for each 1% of attainment with no cap on incentive compensation.

For non-quota-based sales performance elements such as strategic sales objectives, Cisco may pay 0% up to 125% of target. Cisco sales plans do not have a minimum threshold of performance for sales incentive compensation to be paid.

The applicable full salary ranges for this position, by specific state, are listed below:

New York City Metro Area:

$167,700.00 - $282,000.00

Non-Metro New York state & Washington state:

$149,100.00 - $250,900.00

* For quota-based sales roles on Cisco's sales plan, the ranges provided in this posting include base pay and sales target incentive compensation combined.

** Employees in Illinois, whether exempt or non-exempt, will participate in a unique time off program to meet local requirements.