The application window is expected to close on: 09/04/2026

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

Hybrid role located in San Jose CA. Minimum 3 days in office per week.

Meet the Team

Cisco IQ Platform is the foundation the rest of Cisco IQ is built on — infrastructure, framework, system services, data, connectors and reliability engineering, all under one roof.

This role leads the platform infrastructure team: the framework and common services that product teams build against, and the on-premises appliance platform our customers run in their own data centers. Two very different delivery models, one shared foundation. When this team gets it right, everyone else moves faster and nobody has to think about the plumbing.

The team is small and senior — principal engineers and technical leads who have been doing this a long time and have strong opinions. It is also about to get considerably bigger.

Your Impact

You will own the platform framework, common services and the on-premises appliance platform for Cisco IQ, working with a globally distributed team split across the US, Europe and India.

Roughly half this job is technical direction. We are in the middle of normalizing our APIs and consolidating a framework that grew up in pieces across several teams. You will set the direction for that work, make the calls on what gets standardized versus what stays flexible, and keep the same foundation serving both our SaaS and appliance deployments rather than letting the two quietly fork.

The other half is building the team. You are inheriting a strong senior core and the team is expanding. Hiring, onboarding and figuring out how a much larger team stays coordinated will be a real part of your first few months.

This is a hands-on role. You will be in design reviews, architecture debates and postmortems, and you should be able to read the code and challenge a technical decision on the merits. You are leading principal engineers who have earned their opinions — but you do need to hold your own with them.

Day to day you will work closely with Product management, SRE, Experience Reliability Engineering, other groups in IO services and with the technical leads driving on-premises deployment and framework work. Platform decisions land on other people's roadmaps, so a lot of the job is making sure those conversations happen early.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree and 15+ years of relevant professional experience.
• 5+ years managing software engineers (specifically Senior & Principal-level), including hiring, coaching and performance management.
• Technical engineering experience with platform, infrastructure or distributed systems at a company shipping enterprise-scale software.
• Experience owning a platform or shared services layer that other engineering teams depend on, including the roadmap and technical direction for it.
• Has delivered cloud-native software to production (Kubernetes, containers, microservices, CI/CD), as an engineer or a leader who stayed close to it.
• Demonstrated track record of growing & developing teams. while keeping delivery on track.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with both SaaS and on-premises or customer-deployed products, and the trade-offs that come with supporting both from one codebase.
• API design and normalization work at scale — versioning, deprecation, migrating consumers off old interfaces without breaking them.
• Worked and delivered products using Cloud Native technologies
• Managed teams distributed across time zones, particularly US and India.
• Demonstrated depth in one or more of: platform frameworks, IAM and multi-tenancy, containerized runtime, appliance lifecycle and upgrade.
• Uses AI-assisted tooling to speed up engineering work, and thoughtful about where it helps and where it does not.
• Clear communicator in writing. Much of the coordination in a distributed org happens in docs and reviews rather than meetings.
• Experience partnering with SRE and reliability functions on shared infrastructure ownership.

 

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 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:

$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.