Site Reliability Engineer – Networking

Webex Events (formerly Socio); Ashburn (VA); On-site; USD 165,000 - 241,000; Full time

Job summary

Cisco is seeking a senior reliability engineer to strengthen production systems in FedRAMP/IL-5 contexts. You will design, deploy and monitor scalable networks and cloud infrastructure, participate in on-call rotations, and drive improvements to availability, latency and security.

This role emphasizes incident response, disaster recovery testing, automation, and collaboration with development, security, and operations teams to ensure compliant, high‑trust services.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of related experience in reliability engineering or SRE.
• Solid conceptual and practical knowledge across multiple tech domains.
• Experience with disaster recovery and incident response.

Responsibilities

• Improve product reliability by designing scalable, resilient systems.
• Lead on-call rotations and incident management with post-mortems.
• Develop automation to reduce operational costs and improve monitoring.
• Design disaster recovery measures and test them regularly.
• Collaborate with security to implement controls.

Skills

SRE practices

On-call responsibility

Incident management

Network reliability

Security controls input

Education

Bachelor's degree

Job description

Job description

Job Type: Full-time, Volunteer
Job Title

The successful applicant may be performing work in FedRAMP High or IL-5 environments, and therefore, must be a U.S. Person (i.e. U.S. citizen, U.S. national, lawful permanent resident, asylee, or refugee). This position may also perform work that the U.S. government has specified can only be performed by a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil.

From a reliability standpoint, this role involves evaluating the scalability, resiliency, performance, and security properties and techniques used in production environments. It supports the uptime of production services through an On-Call rotation, which includes monitoring and alerting to meet internal Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and customer-facing Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Ensuring reliable incident processes is achieved by conducting Disaster Recovery drills. The role also focuses on improving reliability through incident management by investigating incidents, implementing remediation strategies, and learning from past incidents to make improvements. It involves determining the reliability and security requirements of components and systems to meet the reliability objectives of the company, customers, and any relevant governmental agencies. Additionally, the role aims to reduce operational expenses through automation, by identifying and mitigating failure points, and automating repetitive and resource-intensive tasks. It also involves developing new acceleration techniques and analytical tools to ensure the early identification of potential issues with new products, packaging, processes, and overall product reliability.

Ensures a reliable and scalable network, manages network / cloud infrastructure and storage systems supporting business operations, and responds to planned maintenance, real-time outages, and issues.

Plans, designs and implements local and wide-area network solutions between multiple platforms and protocols.

What You’ll Do:

• 7+ yrs experienced professional using best practices and knowledge of internal or external business issues to improve products or services.
• Works independently, but receives minimal guidance and direction from leader then determines best approach to accomplish work.
• Acts as a resource for colleagues with less experience.
• Understands project and/or department needs and establishes relationships with appropriate cross-functional stakeholders to gather input, collect information, and complete work steps.
• Designs and deploys small to mid-size or moderately complex solutions to optimize reliability, availability, latency, and performance.
• Integrates knowledge of design, automation, and deployment with expertise in coding to improve service reliability for existing or new systems and adapts for regions, countries, or customers.
• Designs and tests high availability and disaster recovery measures for our services to ensure automation is improving reliability, scalability, and velocity.
• Forecasts and builds reports to determine at what point resources will be at capacity.
• Designs and implements tools that provide visibility into performance and reliability of our infrastructure.
• Builds automated platforms.
• Monitors the environment and works with Developers and Ops to identify problems and develop monitoring tools that provide visibility into performance and reliability, serves as on-call SRE, leads post mortems, and writes root cause analysis.
• Builds and ensures security controls are in place in regards to architectural design, collaborates with security in designing or providing input to security controls, and may actively contribute in security incident response.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelors + 7 years of related experience, or Masters + 4 years of related experience, or PhD + 1 year of related experience.
• Requires solid conceptual and practical knowledge in primary technical job family and knowledge of related technical job families; has worked with a range of technologies.

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 $165,000.00 to $241,400.00 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 of unused sick time carried forward from one calendar year to 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:

$165,000.00 – $277,600.00

Non-Metro New York state & Washington state:

$146,700.00 – $247,000.00

* 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.