Senior Site Reliability Engineer – Observability

Cisco

. Design, deploy, operate, and continuously improve enterprise observability platforms .

Posted 10/5/2026full-timeUnited StatesSenior💰 $167,700 - $245,200 per yearWebsite

Core Competencies

Role fit

Core Competencies

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Demonstrates expertise in designing, deploying, and operating enterprise observability platforms, with a strong focus on Splunk, Elasticsearch, and distributed tracing technologies. Proficient in automation and infrastructure as code practices, ensuring high availability and reliability in production environments.

Highest-signal resume keywords

Splunk Enterprise AdministrationElasticsearch Platform DesignInfrastructure As Code (Terraform)Distributed Tracing (Grafana Tempo, OpenTelemetry)Production Incident Troubleshooting

ATS Keywords

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Hard Skills

Splunk SPLElasticsearchPrometheusGrafanaKafkaPythonGoRubyBashTerraform

Soft Skills

CommunicationCollaborationProblem-Solving

Tools & Technologies

Splunk CloudGrafana TempoKubernetesAWSAzureGCPAnsibleCI/CD PipelinesService Mesh TechnologiesConsul

Certifications & Qualifications

Splunk Certification

Industry Keywords

Site Reliability EngineeringPlatform EngineeringDevOpsObservability StrategiesCapacity PlanningIncident ManagementFedRAMPRegulated EnvironmentsHigh AvailabilityOperational Support

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

AnsibleAWSAzureCloudConsulDistributed SystemsElasticSearchGoogle Cloud PlatformGrafanaKafkaKubernetesLinuxPrometheusPythonRubySplunkTerraformGo

About the role

Key responsibilities & 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 for 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 to 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
Support customer-facing production services and Kubernetes-based platform workloads such as Nextunnel
Improve visibility, reduce time to detect and resolve incidents, increase platform reliability, and strengthen operational excellence across Cisco’s cloud environment

Requirements

What you’ll need

7+ 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
Must be a U.S. Person (U.S. citizen or U.S. national)
Work must be performed from within the United States
Preferred: Splunk certification
Preferred: Experience with Kubernetes and containerized production workloads
Preferred: Experience operating cloud infrastructure in AWS, Azure, or GCP
Preferred: Experience with Ansible, Consul, CI/CD pipelines, or service mesh technologies
Preferred: Experience with SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, capacity planning, and incident management
Preferred: Experience supporting FedRAMP, government, or other regulated environments
Preferred: Experience building secure, highly available, and compliant observability platforms
Preferred: Experience leading cross-functional technical initiatives from proposal through implementation

Benefits

Comp & perks

Medical, dental and vision insurance
401(k) plan with a Cisco matching contribution
Paid parental leave
Short- and long-term disability coverage
Basic life insurance
Cisco restricted stock unit grants may be available
10 paid holidays per full calendar year
1 floating holiday for non-exempt employees
1 paid day off for employee’s birthday
Paid year-end holiday shutdown
4 paid days off for personal wellness
16 days of paid vacation per full calendar year for non-exempt employees
Flexible vacation time off program with no defined limit for eligible exempt employees
80 hours of sick time off provided on hire date and each January 1st thereafter
Up to 80 hours of unused sick time carried forward annually
Additional paid time away for critical or emergency family issues
Optional 10 paid volunteer days per full calendar year
Annual bonuses for non-sales roles, subject to Cisco policies