Senior Site Reliability Engineer – Observability

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

Job summary

Cisco is seeking a Senior Site Reliability Engineer within the Observability team of Cloud Network Platform Engineering. You will design, deploy, operate, and improve enterprise observability platforms for logs, metrics, traces, and alerts across large-scale cloud infrastructure.

Initial focus on Kubernetes-based workloads (Nextunnel) and broader SRE initiatives will follow. Responsibilities include building Splunk Enterprise/Cloud infra, Elasticsearch clusters, Grafana Tempo/OpenTelemetry

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering 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, and operating Elasticsearch/ELK-based platforms.
• Experience with Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Kafka, and distributed tracing.

Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, operate, and improve enterprise observability platforms for logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting.
• Build and maintain monitoring stacks including Splunk, Elasticsearch, Prometheus, Grafana, and Tempo.
• Develop data instrumentation standards, retention policies, and observability patterns.
• Automate infrastructure provisioning and configuration using Terraform and Ansible.
• Participate in capacity planning, performance tuning, upgrades, and incident response.
• Lead cross-functional collaboration to improve reliability and operational excellence.

Skills

SRE Experience

Distributed systems

On-call operations

Communication skills

Tools

Splunk Enterprise

Splunk Cloud

Elasticsearch

Tempo/OpenTelemetry

Prometheus

Grafana

Kibana

Kafka

Terraform

Ansible

AWS

Azure

GCP

Kubernetes

CI/CD

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 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 cond