Software Engineering Technical Leader

Cisco Systems, Inc.; San Jose (CA); Hybrid; USD 214,000 - 310,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

401(k) with Cisco match

Paid parental leave

Job summary

Cisco Systems, Inc. is seeking a Software Engineer for Site Reliability Engineering - Security in a hybrid role based near San Jose. You’ll shape secure infrastructure and internal platforms, drive Zero Trust, and embed security signals into operation and observability.

You will influence leadership decisions, reduce attack surfaces, and ensure safe-by-default developer environments. The role targets seasoned professionals with cloud security, SRE, and automation experience, working across

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree with 12+ years of related experience or equivalent.
• 5+ years of hands-on experience with major cloud providers and cloud security posture.
• 3+ years building automation in Python and/or Go for security use cases.
• 5+ years applying SRE practices in production with SLIs/SLOs and incident post-mortems.

Responsibilities

• Design secure, scalable infrastructure and developer platforms.
• Drive Zero Trust adoption across workloads and internal tooling.
• Embed security signals into observability and incident response.
• Advise leadership and balance security with velocity and reliability.
• Lead cross-team post-mortems and automate policy as code to reduce toil.

Skills

Cloud security

Go/Python automation

SRE practices

Zero Trust

Incident response

Education

Bachelor's degree + 12 years

Master's degree + 8 years

PhD + 5 years

Tools

Terraform

OPA/Kyverno/Checkov

ArgoCD/Flux

CI/CD security gates

Job description

The application window is expected to close on: 09/01/2026

***We are looking for candidate local to San Jose as this is a hybrid role***

Meet the Team

The Site Reliability Engineering - Security team makes Cisco CX Engineering's software systems secure, resilient, and fast to build on. We own the security posture of production infrastructure and of the internal platforms engineers depend on every day - Kubernetes control planes, GitOps and CI/CD pipelines, observability stacks, and AI/ML operations. We sit at the intersection of Platform, Security, Compliance, and Operations, so our work shapes how hundreds of engineers ship software. We are a small, senior, high-autonomy team that values deep technical ownership, blameless learning, and automating our way out of toil. Our largest and newest platform is Cisco IQ, the AI-powered front door to all of Cisco's Customer Experience services, so the systems you secure carry customer inventory, vulnerability detection, and support data at Cisco scale.

Your Impact

As a Software Engineer on the Site Reliability Engineering - Security team, you set the technical direction for how Cisco CX Engineering builds and operates secure infrastructure and developer platforms. You will design systems that are secure by default, drive Zero Trust adoption across infrastructure and internal tooling, and embed security signals into SRE observability and incident response so threats surface as quickly as outages do. You will advise engineering leadership and negotiate the trade-offs between security, velocity, and reliability on decisions that affect the entire organization. Success looks like measurably reduced attack surface, faster vulnerability remediation, and platforms that engineers can use safely by default without slowing down. This is a role for someone who wants their architectural decisions to outlive any single project.

• Design and build secure, scalable infrastructure and developer platforms so that security controls are embedded by default rather than bolted on later.
• Harden the platforms themselves - Kubernetes control planes, GitOps systems, CI/CD pipelines, and observability stacks - treating internal tooling as the high-value target it is.
• Drive Zero Trust at scale through workload identity, continuous verification, and micro-segmentation so access is earned rather than assumed.
• Own the reliability and security posture of critical services including secrets management, PKI, and IAM governance to keep the foundations of the environment trustworthy.
• Lead cross-team incident response and blameless post-mortems that convert both reliability and security failures into permanent fixes.
• Automate security and compliance through policy-as-code and automated evidence collection to reduce toil and shorten remediation time.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree + 12 years of related experience, or Master's degree + 8 years of related experience, or PhD + 5 years of related experience.
• 5+ years of hands-on production experience operating and scaling at least one major cloud (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including direct ownership of cloud security posture: advanced IAM, KMS/secrets management, network controls, and CSPM or equivalent tooling.
• 3+ years building production automation and tooling in Python and/or Go applied to security use cases such as vulnerability management, secrets orchestration, compliance evidence collection, or detection integration.
• 5+ years applying SRE practices in production, including defining SLIs/SLOs, managing error budgets, serving as incident commander, and running post-mortems that drive follow-up engineering work.
• 5+ years applying security fundamentals in production environments: threat modeling, secure-by-default architecture, least-privilege and workload identity, secrets and certificate lifecycle management, and vulnerability management at scale.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Hands-on production Kubernetes security experience: RBAC at scale, Network Policies, Pod Security Standards, admission controllers, image signing and verification, control-plane hardening, and service mesh mTLS.
• Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform) with policy-as-code (OPA, Kyverno, Checkov, tfsec), GitOps delivery (ArgoCD or Flux), and CI/CD security gates including SAST, SCA, image and secret scanning, SBOM generation, and artifact signing.
• Deep experience with security observability and runtime detection tooling (Falco, eBPF-based detection, SIEM, CSPM/CNAPP platforms) integrated with Prometheus, Grafana, or OpenTelemetry.
• Experience securing AI/ML workloads and MLOps pipelines, including training and inference pipeline security and model security, and applying AI/LLM capabilities to security automation with human-in-the-loop guardrails.
• Security certifications such as CISSP, CCSP, or AWS Certified Security – Specialty, paired with strong communication and influence skills and a track record of driving security and architectural decisions across organizational levels.

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 $214,100.00 to $309,800.00 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:

$214,100.00 - $356,300.00

Non-Metro New York state & Washington state:

$192,400.00 - $317,200.00

* 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.