Senior Software Engineer – Application Reliability, Kubernetes, GCP, SQL

Cisco

Senior engineer ensuring reliability of Cisco’s enterprise AI applications through observability, automation, and self-healing. Building Kubernetes, GCP, BigQuery, LangGraph, and Python solutions.

Posted 9/3/2026full-timeSan Jose • California, North Carolina • 🇺🇸 United StatesSenior💰 $203,000 - $258,600 per yearWebsite

Core Competencies

Role fit

Core Competencies

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Demonstrates expertise in application reliability and observability, leveraging strong Python development skills and deep SQL knowledge with BigQuery. Capable of implementing SLI/SLO frameworks and driving a reliability culture across engineering teams.

Highest-signal resume keywords

Python DevelopmentBigQuery SQL ExpertiseGCP ExperienceApplication-Level SLI/SLO FrameworksAgent Evaluation Harnesses

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills

Application ReliabilityObservability SystemsAnomaly DetectionRoot Cause AnalysisFeature FlagsAutomated RollbackComplex SQL QueriesSchema DesignDistributed TracingDebugging Skills

Soft Skills

CollaborationLeadershipCommunication

Tools & Technologies

LookerBigQueryBigTableGKECloud LoggingCloud TraceCloud MonitoringLangGraph

Certifications & Qualifications

Bachelor's Degree in Computer ScienceMaster's Degree in Engineering

Industry Keywords

AI-Powered ApplicationsProduction OperationsReliability EngineeringAIOpsEvent-Driven Systems

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

BigQueryCloudGoogle Cloud PlatformKubernetesPythonSQL

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Own the reliability of AI-powered applications and features from the user’s perspective
Define, implement, and enforce feature-level SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets for APIs, RAG systems, AI agents, and user-facing applications
Build and maintain application observability systems using Looker dashboards on BigQuery and BigTable
Provide visibility into feature health, error patterns, and usage trends for developers, product managers, and leadership
Design and build LangGraph-based agents for automated issue identification and remediation
Implement anomaly detection, root cause diagnosis, auto-rollback, feature-flag kill switches, and self-healing workflows
Develop agent evaluation harnesses for benchmarking, multi-step workflow testing, non-deterministic outputs, and regression testing
Write complex BigQuery SQL for usage trend analysis, anomaly detection, and operational analytics
Design BigQuery table schemas optimized for observability and debugging
Analyze application usage trends and adoption metrics to identify reliability risks, capacity needs, and degraded user experiences
Partner with application development teams to embed deployment safety, structured logging, and distributed tracing practices
Lead application-level incident response, root cause analysis, and blameless postmortems
Build Python tooling and automation to reduce mean time to detect and resolve application-layer issues
Apply emerging AI techniques to improve platform reliability and developer productivity
Collaborate with application developers, data engineers, infrastructure SREs, security, compliance, product teams, and leadership

Requirements

What you’ll need

10+ years of experience in software engineering with significant focus on reliability, observability, or production operations
Bachelor's or Master's Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical discipline
Strong Python development skills, including production tooling, automation, and agent-based systems
Production GCP experience deploying and managing applications on GKE (Kubernetes)
Deep SQL expertise with BigQuery, including complex queries, window functions, schema design, and cost optimization
Hands-on experience with BigTable or an equivalent high-throughput operational data system
Experience designing and operating application-level SLI/SLO frameworks, burn-rate alerting, and error budget policies
Strong application-layer debugging skills, including distributed tracing, profiling, structured log analysis, and dependency mapping
Experience building agent evaluation harnesses
Familiarity with A2A protocols, streaming architectures, and event-driven systems
Experience with feature flags, canary deployments, progressive rollouts, and automated rollback
Experience with GCP observability services such as Cloud Logging, Cloud Trace, and Cloud Monitoring
Exposure to AIOps concepts including ML-driven anomaly detection, automated root cause analysis, and intelligent alerting
Experience driving reliability culture across engineering teams
Active engagement with the evolving AI ecosystem
Hands-on GenAI application development experience with LangGraph, agent engineering, prompt design, and agentic workflows
Experience building Looker dashboards and LookML models for operational observability

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
Grants of Cisco restricted stock units, subject to eligibility and continued employment
10 paid holidays per full calendar year
1 floating holiday for non-exempt employees
Paid day off for employee’s birthday
Paid year-end holiday shutdown
4 paid days off for personal wellness
16 days of paid vacation time 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
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’s policies
Performance-based incentive pay for sales-plan employees