Senior Site Reliability Engineer – Observability

Role details

The application window is expected to close on: 11/11/2026 Meet the Team Join 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 Impact Design, 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 Qualifications 7+ years of related experience, or Master + 4 years of related experience, or PhD + 1 year of related experience in Site Reliability Engineering, Platform Engineering, DevOps, or a related field. Experience administering Splunk Enterprise or Splunk Cloud in a production environment, with solid understanding of Splunk SPL for dashboards and alerts. Experience designing, deploying, and operating Elasticsearch or ELK-based platforms, along with Prometheus, Grafana, distributed tracing (Grafana Tempo, OpenTelemetry), and Kafka. Experience in Infrastructure as Code using Terraform and understanding of Linux, networking, distributed systems, and production operations. Programming or scripting experience in Python, Go, Ruby, Bash, or similar languages, with demonstrated ability to troubleshoot production incidents and participate in on-call support. Preferred Qualifications Splunk 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. Demonstrated experience implementing and operating modern observability strategies across logs, metrics, and traces 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. Strong communication, collaboration, and problem-solving skills. Technology Stack Splunk 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 Requirement The 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 co