Senior Site Reliability Engineer – Observability

Job description

The application window is expected to close on: 12/17/2026Meet the TeamJoin the Observability team within Cloud Network Platform Engineering’s Site Reliability Engineering organization. You will help design, build, and operate enterprise observability platforms for logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting across large-scale cloud infrastructure. This role will contribute to customer-facing production services, with an initial focus on Kubernetes-based platform workloads such as Nextunnel and broader SRE and reliability initiatives over time. You will lead efforts that improve visibility, reduce time to detect and resolve incidents, increase platform reliability, and strengthen operational excellence across Cisco’s cloud environment. The role includes participation in a shared SRE pager and on-call rotation, production support, and incident response. Your ImpactDesign, deploy, operate, and continuously improve enterprise observability platforms. Build and maintain Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud infrastructure, including indexers, Search Head Clusters, heavy forwarders, deployment servers, and related integrations. Deploy and operate large-scale Elasticsearch clusters supporting log analytics, search, and operational troubleshooting. Design, deploy, and support distributed tracing platforms using Grafana Tempo and OpenTelemetry. Build and maintain end-to-end telemetry pipelines for logs, metrics, and traces. Define instrumentation standards, data quality practices, retention policies, and observability patterns. Scale and optimize Prometheus, Grafana, Kafka, Tempo, OpenTelemetry, and related monitoring systems. Develop dashboards, alerts, analytics, and trace visualizations using Splunk SPL, Grafana, Kibana, and Tempo. Establish monitoring and alerting standards that improve service-level visibility and reduce mean time to detect and resolve incidents. Automate infrastructure provisioning, configuration, upgrades, and operational processes using Terraform and configuration management tools. Participate in capacity planning, performance tuning, upgrades, patching, disaster recovery, and production readiness reviews. Troubleshoot complex distributed-systems issues and lead or support incident response and root-cause analysis. Partner with platform, application, security, database, and network engineering teams to improve reliability and operational consistency. Contribute to shared SRE standards, documentation, runbooks, and engineering best practices. Participate in the shared SRE pager and on-call rotation for production services. Minimum Qualifications7+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, Platform Engineering, DevOps, or a related field. Experience administering Splunk Enterprise or Splunk Cloud in a production environment. Solid understanding of Splunk SPL and experience developing production dashboards, alerts, and analytics. Experience designing, deploying, and operating Elasticsearch or ELK-based platforms. Experience with Prometheus, Grafana, Grafana Tempo, OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing, and Kafka. Demonstrated experience implementing and operating modern observability strategies across logs, metrics, and traces. Experience with Terraform and Infrastructure as Code practices. Strong understanding of Linux, networking, distributed systems, high availability, and production operations. Programming or scripting experience in Python, Go, Ruby, Bash, or a similar language. Experience troubleshooting production incidents and working within an on-call or operational support model. Strong communication, collaboration, and problem-solving skills. Preferred QualificationsSplunk certification. Experience with Kubernetes and containerized production workloads. Experience operating cloud infrastructure in AWS, Azure, or GCP. Experience with Ansible, Consul, CI/CD pipelines, or service mesh technologies. Experience with reliability engineering practices, including SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, capacity planning, and incident management. Experience supporting FedRAMP, government, or other regulated environments. Experience building secure, highly available, and compliant observability platforms. Experience leading cross-functional technical initiatives from proposal through implementation. Technology StackSplunk Enterprise, Splunk Cloud, Elasticsearch, ELK, Kibana, Prometheus, Grafana, Grafana Tempo, OpenTelemetry, Kafka, Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible, AWS, Azure, GCP, Python, Go, Bash, CI/CD, distributed tracing, and cloud-native infrastructure. US RequirementThe successful applicant may perform work in FedRAMP High or IL-5 environments and therefore must be a U.S. Person (U.S. citizen or U.S. national). Work must be performed from within the United States. 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 $167,700.00 to $245,200.00 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