Principal Software Engineer, Security Innovation

The application window is expected to close on October 14th, 2025. Note: Job posting may be removed earlier if the position is filled or if a sufficient number of applications are received.

Meet the Team

The Infrastructure and Security CTO team has an incubation team working on a platform centric approach to the next generation data center. Specifically, we are creating winning solutions for workload orchestration that focus on ease of use and integrating identity, security, networking, and management services from Cisco's entire portfolio.

Your Impact

As a director-level leader and individual contributor, you will be an integral part of the incubation team, joining us at an early stage of the journey and responsible for leading the ideation, design, development and testing phases of new products. As an authority in this domain, you have strong technology experience, an eye for business and a good level of visibility and recognition in the industry (including for example patents, publication/blogs, open-source contributions, conference speaker, academic collaboration, active role in industry consortium...). You thrive in multifaceted environments and can be counted on when the going gets tough. You are also an outstanding communicator who can pitch solutions for complex problems in a simple and articulate way, and adjust communication style to the audience (Customers, Exec, Business, Technical, UX ...).

As a Principal Engineer for Cisco, you will have a passion for platform engineering with a focus on making things easier for the customer. Your contributions are high quality and outcome focused. You have a love and passion for making an impact in the industry with innovative products. You know and use containers and virtual machines, and you have your list of things you wish was better about them. You are not afraid to reimagine entrenched systems and products and explore how we should disrupt them. You care about security and ease of use, and you recognize doing both well is hard. You are comfortable working with ambiguity and help the team find a path to adding value for our customers. You have a passion for being part of the leadership for a team and mentoring others. In this role, you will:

• Design and develop a data processing system that collects and consumes the configuration and operational data from infrastructure systems (hyperscalers, VMware, OpenShift, etc) and synthesizes the data to show the relationship between workloads, networks, network functions, security, identity, IPAM, and other workloads.
• Collaborate with the team to design and develop a workload platform leveraging Kubernetes, Cilium and KubeVirt with a focus on ease of use.
• Collaborate with the Isovalent team on making our platform's networking seamlessly co-exist with the customer's existing network topology.
• Collaborate with AI team to leverage agentic AI for running playbook/automation for migration of workloads and integrations from existing workload platforms to our platform.
• Mentor engineers and lead by example with great code, code reviews, designs and communication.

Minimum Qualifications

• 15+ years of experience as a software developer to include 5+ years as an operator of large-scale systems that included developing and deploying tooling for those operations.
• Demonstrated experience with at least one hyperscaler (AWS, GCP, Azure) and one on premises virtual infrastructure provider (VMware, OpenStack, OpenShift, Nutanix, KVM/Other).
• Demonstrated ability to deliver outcomes that involved building and/or optimizing large scale complex system(s).
• Demonstrated experience with Kubernetes operations.

Preferred Qualifications

• Ability to constantly identify, follow and learn innovative technologies, work in a fast-paced, team-focused environment.
• Excellent leadership and communication skills.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to take on complex issues.
• Experience developing CRD/Operators for Kubernetes
• Works well on a distributed team.
• Helps others when they need it; and asks for help when you need it.
• Strong communicator.
• Proven record and strong skills in platform engineering and building teams that build and operate platforms.
• Timely delivery on your commitments to the team.
• High quality artifacts like code, code reviews, designs, and feedback to teammates and leaders.
• Having fun while delivering value to our customers.

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. Simply put - we power the future.

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.