Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Production Engineer - ThousandEyes

Job posting may be removed earlier if the position is filled or if a sufficient number of applications are received.

This role follows a hybrid work model, with in-office attendance expected once a week in San Francisco, Seattle, Austin or New York.

Meet the Team

Cisco ThousandEyes is a leading Digital Experience Assurance platform that empowers organizations to deliver seamless digital experiences across every network—even those beyond their ownership. Leveraging AI and an unparalleled set of cloud, internet, and enterprise network telemetry data, ThousandEyes enables IT teams to proactively detect, diagnose, and resolve issues before they impact end-user experiences.

ThousandEyes is deeply integrated across Cisco's extensive technology portfolio, supporting customers in scaling deployments while offering AI-powered assurance insights within Cisco’s Networking, Security, Collaboration, and Observability portfolios.

Your Impact

We are seeking a skilled Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) in Production Engineering with a strong background in SaaS and operations. You will design and manage large-scale, highly available distributed systems in the cloud, collaborating directly with application development teams to enhance the reliability, performance, and security of our platform.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with software engineers to optimize architecture and services for availability, latency, performance, and reliability using cloud-native tools.
• Design and implement scalable operations tooling to support platform growth and scaling across multiple regions.
• Design, deploy, and maintain AWS cloud-native services that are elastic and resilient to failure.
• Participate in and improve our 24x7 incident response and on-call rotation.
• Use and expand our existing CNCF solutions like Kubernetes, Service Mesh, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, and ArgoCD to increase platform reliability.
• Automate production operations to provide guardrails and continuous platform operation.
• Develop automation solutions for scalable service and platform operations, including deployment, scale testing, graceful failure, and chaos testing.
• Stay updated on industry best practices for scalability and reliability to improve the scalability of the ThousandEyes platform.
• Identify and provide solutions to common obstacles hindering operational excellence across engineering teams.
• Generalize and standardize solutions and processes to enable repeated success across our microservice-based multi-region platform.
• Play a key role in the ThousandEyes platform by leveraging scale testing, additional environments, and working with application teams to improve system reliability.
• Manage a rapidly growing infrastructure capable of handling substantial daily data volumes, emphasizing operations/infrastructure/everything as code.

Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in a related role
• Proficiency in software development with languages such as Python or Go
• Shown ability to build and implement scalable, well-tested, and security-focused solutions that integrate security protocols throughout the development and deployment lifecycle
• Strong understanding of Unix/Linux systems, including kernel, system libraries, file systems, and client-server protocols
• Knowledge of Site Reliability principles: Incident Response, Change Management, Distributed Systems, Deployment Strategies, and SLOs

Preferred Qualifications

• Familiarity with procedures for operating a large-scale, highly available enterprise platform
• Excellent communication and documentation skills
• Strong sense of ownership, drive, and attention to detail
• Expert-level knowledge of Kubernetes and its ecosystem
• In-depth knowledge of cloud providers, preferably AWS

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. 

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:

Non-Metro New York state & Washington state:

* 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.