Principal Software Engineering

Meet the Team

Cisco Validated Infrastructure Services (CVIS) establishes and proves the performance of large AI clusters before they are handed over to customers. We deploy each cluster, validate it against performance baselines, and deliver the evidence that it is ready for service.

The platform behind that work is full-stack. It combines workflow and API services, network and infrastructure automation, and the UI used to run validation across labs and customer environments.

Your Impact

As a Principal Software Engineer, you will be the hands-on architect and lead developer of this platform. You will take it from design into daily use: services, workflow automation, environment orchestration, diagnostics, and the operational experience.

You will turn expert deployment practice into software that many teams can run, and you will stay accountable for the behavior of the whole system.

• Define the architecture and build the core platform: APIs, workflow orchestration, backend services, and the engineer-facing experience.
• Orchestrate lab and customer environments at scale, including concurrent runs, scheduling, throttling, cleanup, high availability, and failure handling.
• Automate discovery, provisioning, configuration, and validation across compute, network, and storage, including firmware, operating systems, and cluster software when the deployment requires them.
• Provide versioned workflows and multi-tenant access control so deployment and product teams can share one platform.
• Automate performance validation during bring-up: run functional, resilience, and performance tests across compute, network, and storage, compare results with baselines, and produce the evidence used for handover.
• Build the surfaces engineers use daily: dashboards, health and performance views, diagnostics, reporting, and triage.
• Add AI-assisted diagnostics and triage, with results validated in the real environment.
• Detect configuration drift and support policy-controlled remediation.
• Lead design reviews, mentor senior engineers, and turn customer and field experience into reusable platform capabilities.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, computer engineering, electrical engineering, or a related field plus 15 years of related experience; a master's degree plus 12 years; a PhD plus 8 years; or equivalent related work experience.
• Experience serving as an architect for at least one platform, from technical design and implementation through production deployment and adoption by [one or more teams.
• Experience automating labs, networks, devices, or infrastructure at scale, and running that automation on Kubernetes or an equivalent control plane.
• Experience identifying and resolving system-performance constraints using profiling, benchmarking, monitoring, or load testing, with documented improvements in areas such as latency, throughput, capacity, or resource utilization.
• 10 + years of software-design and development experience using Python and at least one additional production language, such as Go, Java, or Rust.
• Experience building production APIs, workflow or orchestration services, and the operational UI or dashboards engineers use to run them.
• Experience delivering documented improvements in at least one area-such as system capacity, delivery cycle time, reliability, or user adoption-and coordinating implementation across engineering, operations, and customer-facing teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Workflow engines, versioned automation and event-driven architecture with message queues and operational data stores.
• Device or service orchestration, model-driven automation, or scale testing of large managed environments.
• Performance baselines, capacity testing, resilience testing, fault injection, or failure-mode analysis.
• AI-assisted triage, diagnosis, or remediation validated in real environments.
• Large GPU clusters, high-performance computing, or customer cluster bring-up.
• Slurm or other HPC and AI workload schedulers.
• PXE, DHCP, Redfish, firmware and BIOS automation, or infrastructure as code.
• High-performance Ethernet, InfiniBand, or RoCE automation, and high-performance storage.
• Cisco UCS, Cisco switching, NVIDIA platforms, Supermicro, VAST Data, NVIDIA Base Command Manager, or comparable platforms.
• CI/CD and automated quality gates for infrastructure or orchestration software.

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:

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:

Non-Metro New York state & Washington state:

* 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.