Senior Engineering Manager: SONiC Platform Development @ Cisco

Meet the Team

The Cisco Distributed System Engineering (DSE) group is at the forefront of developing products that power the largest networks in the world. The networking industry is going through a massive transformation to build the next generation infrastructure to meet the needs of AI/ML workloads and continuously increasing internet users and application. We are uniquely positioned to capture that market transition.

This team builds products by harnessing the potential of open-source technologies while pushing the boundaries on Systems and Silicon Architecture. They are the developers and leaders who are passionate about tackling complex technology, building large scale distributed systems and comfortable working with open-source communities and technologies.

Your Impact

As a Senior Engineering Manager, you will manage a group of engineers, technical leads and collaborate extensively with other engineering managers across geography. You will be involved with a fast-paced work environment and responsible for end-to-end product development and production support.

The SONiC team in DSE is looking for awesome talented leaders to build the Next Generation NOS, SONiC, for Datacenter Enterprise customers and Service Providers.

In this role you will:

• Manage at least 5-8 full time employees responsible to design and develop high quality networking products.
• Lead and own the development, and deployment of software solutions leveraging SONiC to interface with hardware infrastructure and platform-level components. Own delivery milestone and quality metrics.
• Collaborate with hardware teams to enable optimal hardware-software interactions and expose hardware capabilities through SONiC interfaces.
• Actively participate in the system architecture and design discussions.
• Coordinate cross-functional activities between software, hardware, QA, and systems integration teams.
• Collaborate with product management and customers to understand use cases, gather requirements, and align deliverables with business objectives.
• Lead the evaluation and adoption of new tools, technologies, and methodologies to accelerate development and testing cycles.
• Act as a key liaison with open-source SONiC communities, contributing to upstream development and leveraging community innovations.

Minimum Qualifications

• Around 18-20 years of work experience with minimum 5 years of hands on management experience. You have managed at least 5-8 full time employees.Good in hiring and retaining top talents across grades.
• You are an experienced leader with a successful track record of leading product teams responsible to design and develop high quality networking products. Involved in performance evaluation, salary planning, budgeting and forecasting.
• Experience with platform infrastructure such as ASIC drivers, NPU, BMC, Optics and network OS development.Experience working with virtualization, containerization, and orchestration frameworks such as Docker, Kubernetes and/or similar
• Experience leading teams or technical projects in a complex development environment. Extensive software development experience with Linux based platforms or other like network operating systems such as SONiC.
• Enjoy leading fast paced, high performance agile development teams. You like leading the team from the front, identify team strengths, build in-house talent and competencies.
• Quick learner, self motivated. Proponent of innovation and process improvements in the team with a focus on improving team productivity.Excellent written and verbal communications and negotiation skill.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in CI/CD pipelines and automated testing frameworks
• Experience with platform level security requirements and compliance frameworks
• Exposure to SONiC or experience working with the SONiC open-source community
• Knowledge of hardware abstraction layers and SDKs from major networking silicon providers (such as Broadcom, Marvell, Mellanox etc)