Staff Site Reliability Engineer

The application window is expected to close on: 10/31/2026

This is a Hybrid position requiring approximately 2 days per week on-site at Cisco offices in San Francisco and San Jose, or New York City.

The Splunk Agent Resilience team is defining the future of AI resilience. Together our team provides scalable, cost-effective evaluation and guardrails that ensure AI agents behave as intended, improving reliability and reducing risks. This unified approach empowers our customers to expertly deploy and manage AI-powered applications with enhanced observability and control.

As a Staff Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), you will provide technical leadership for the reliability, scalability, and operational architecture of Splunk Agent Observability's platform. You will define the long-term reliability strategy, lead major infrastructure initiatives, and drive engineering excellence across deployment automation, production operations, and platform resiliency. In addition to owning complex production systems, you will influence engineering direction across teams and establish best practices for operating large-scale cloud and on-prem deployments.

Your Impact

• Define and drive the technical roadmap for platform reliability, scalability, and operational excellence.
• Lead the architecture and evolution of deployment platforms supporting cloud and air-gapped customer environments.
• Establish reliability engineering standards, including service level objectives (SLOs), operational readiness, capacity planning, and resiliency reviews.
• Lead major reliability and scalability initiatives across Kubernetes, deployment infrastructure, databases, and networking.
• Drive automation to eliminate operational toil and improve engineering productivity.
• Design and build internal platforms, frameworks, and tooling that enable reliable operations at scale.
• Lead complex production incident response and drive systemic improvements through root cause analysis and long-term remediation.
• Partner with engineering leadership to influence platform architecture, deployment strategy, and production readiness.
• Mentor engineers and raise the engineering bar through technical leadership, design reviews, and operational guidelines.
• Collaborate with customers and internal teams to build secure, scalable, and highly reliable deployment architectures for both cloud and on-prem environments.

Minimum Qualifications 

• 8+ years’ experience with a Bachelor's degree or 6+ yrs with Masters or 3+ years with a PhD, or equivalent related experience; Experience to include at least 6 years in Site Reliability Engineering, Platform / Cloud / Infrastructure Engineering, or related fields.
• 5+ years’ operating large-scale Kubernetes platforms in production.
• Experience designing highly available, scalable, and resilient distributed systems.
• Experience with AWS, GCP, or other public cloud platforms.
• Strong experience designing CI/CD platforms and deployment automation at scale.

Preferred Qualifications

• Expertise in observability, monitoring, alerting, capacity planning, and performance engineering.
• Strong programming skills in Python and/or Go
• Deep experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or similar)
• Experience with MLOps preferred
• Strong understanding of networking, distributed systems, storage, databases, and cloud architecture
• Experience operating both SaaS and enterprise/on-prem deployments
• Demonstrated technical leadership across multiple engineering teams
• Experience leading incident management, postmortems, and long-term reliability initiatives

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 $186,900.00 to $267,700.00 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:

$186,900.00 - $307,800.00

Non-Metro New York state & Washington state:

$166,300.00 - $274,100.00

* 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.