Software Engineering Tech Lead (SRE + AI)

Job description

Meet the Team The Collaboration Technology Group is redefining the future of teamwork, building services that connect people effortlessly across devices, locations and time zones. Our team builds, runs and continuously improves the platform services behind Cisco’s collaboration products, operating at global scale across numerous datacentres. We’re a passionate, collaborative team focused on reliability, innovation and engineering excellence.

Your impact As a Technical Leader, you will drive the architectural vision and implementation of our next-generation AI-powered Production Intelligence platform. You will combine Site Reliability Engineering practices with modern agentic AI (reusable Skills, Model Context Protocol (MCP), and LLM tooling) to transform how engineering and leadership teams monitor, diagnose, and auto-remediate global SaaS infrastructure.

What you'll do Technical Leadership & Architecture

Define the technical roadmap and architecture for AI-assisted observability, automated incident response, and self-healing cloud infrastructure.

Agentic Workflows & Tooling

Design and build production-grade AI agents, MCP tool integrations, and deterministic evaluation pipelines for automated operational decision support.

Telemetry & Insights

Architect ingestion and correlation pipelines across distributed logs, metrics, OpenTelemetry traces, change events, and runbooks to accelerate Mean Time to Detection (MTTD) and Resolution (MTTR).

Safe Production Automation

Develop proactive anomaly detection and Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) remediation workflows with rigorous safety, security, and quality guardrails.

Reliability & Scalability Engineering

Partner with application and infrastructure teams to define SLIs/SLOs, handle error budgets, and lead deep-dive post-incident reviews (PIRs).

Mentorship & Collaboration

Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, establish engineering best practices, and drive alignment across global development and operations teams. You’ll manage priorities and deadlines, communicate progress clearly and work across teams to turn production needs into reliable software and AI-assisted capabilities. Minimum qualifications Bachelor’s degree + 8 years of related experience, Master’s + 6 years, or PhD + 3 years in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field.

Proven record as a Technical Lead or Lead SRE/Software Engineer delivering distributed, high-availability SaaS platforms at scale. Strong proficiency in Python, Go, Java, or C++ with experience designing microservices, APIs, and production automation. Deep experience with Kubernetes, Docker, and container orchestration in large-scale multi-cluster environments.

Proven background in SRE practices

SLI/SLO design, observability platforms (metrics/logs/traces), incident management, and automated RCA.

Preferred Qualifications

AI & Agentic Systems: Hands-on experience building LLM pipelines, AI Agents, Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers/clients, RAG architectures, and evaluation frameworks.

Observability & Telemetry

Experience with OpenTelemetry (OTel), Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, ThousandEyes, or distributed tracing systems.

Cloud & Infrastructure

Expertise in public cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure), Terraform/IaC, and GitOps/CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions).

Safe Automation & Guardrails

Experience implementing responsible AI guardrails, deterministic fallback logic, and policy-driven remediation engines.

Data & Messaging

Experience with streaming and data platforms (Kafka, Redis, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch/Vector DBs). CollabHiring 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.