Meet the team

Cisco's Cygnus team is building the next-generation Board Support Package (BSP) platform for high-performance routing products powered by Silicon One. We're seeking a Senior Technical Leader to own and drive the architecture and technical strategy for platform infrastructure—data model compilation, automated device access generation, observability, AI-driven tooling, and test infrastructure. You will be recognized as an expert within Cisco on platform infrastructure, responsible for cross-team architectural decisions and ensuring the infrastructure scales across multiple product lines and hardware generations.

You will develop software consistent with Cisco's Design Thinking Principles with a focus on simplification and UX at its core, using secure coding practices, ensuring user privacy, and following software development best practices. You will partner with hardware, platform, and NOS teams across geographies to create scalable infrastructure that absorbs complexity and accelerates engineering velocity. You will set the long-term technical direction, drive AI-powered automation strategy, and mentor tech leads and senior engineers across the team.

What You'll Do

• Recognized as an expert within Cisco on platform infrastructure; proactively identifies and participates in the resolution of complex problems that impact the direction of the business

• Define and own the long-term technical strategy and architecture for platform infrastructure—translating the regional and functional strategic vision into a technical vision with clear engineering priorities, ensuring understanding and alignment across teams

• Architect compiler and code-generation systems at scale that transform hardware specifications into software-consumable data models and device drivers, enabling rapid PID onboarding across multiple product lines

• Drive the AI/ML and automation strategy for platform infrastructure—identifying high-impact opportunities to apply AI-assisted code generation, intelligent test optimization, automated failure triage, and generative tooling across the development lifecycle

• Design and build observability infrastructure—tracing APIs, metrics pipelines, and monitoring systems that provide deep visibility into platform behavior across hardware generations

• Influence technical direction and deliverables across the function; recognize and make trade-offs with respect to the whole system

• Lead cross-team architectural decisions with a focus on scalability, reliability, consistency, and developer experience—driving alignment across hardware, BSP, NOS, and silicon teams; may lead projects that span the business segment, function, or region

• Lead the development and implementation of software development lifecycle and agile engineering strategies across applicable teams in anticipation of the changing software development environment

• Develop and drive utilization of processes for issue identification and sustainable response, proactive tooling, and continuous improvement for production systems

• Mentor senior engineers, conduct design reviews, improve knowledge sharing processes, and raise the technical capability of the broader organization

• Represent the team in cross-site technical forums and may represent or present team outputs at external events; drive alignment between San Jose and Bangalore engineering teams

• Communicate architectural trade-offs, negotiate with cross-functional partners, and influence outcomes at the organizational level; build and maintain long-term relationships with key stakeholders

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree with 12+ years of related experience, or Master’s degree with 8+ years of related experience, or PhD with 5+ years of related experience

• Experience in architecting and delivering large-scale developer tools, infrastructure systems, or compiler/code-generation platforms

• Proficiency in C or Python; familiarity with C++ is preferred

• Experience with test frameworks such as pytest, unittest, or similar automation tools, including test infrastructure design at scale

• Experience with CI/CD systems such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or equivalent platforms, including build and release infrastructure

• Experience designing observability systems, including tracing, metrics, and logging (e.g., OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack)

• Proficiency with Docker and containerized development and test environments

• Experience leading cross-team and cross-site technical initiatives

• Experience mentoring engineers and contributing to improving the technical quality across teams

Preferred Qualifications

• Familiarity with network operating systems or embedded platforms (IOS-XR, NX-OS, SONiC, or similar)

• Familiarity with Board Support Package (BSP) development, hardware abstraction layers, or platform bring-up

• Experience building developer tools with intuitive UX

• Background in infrastructure and automation at scale

• Experience with data modeling and schema design for complex technical domains

• Track record of driving AI/ML adoption in engineering organizations—converting manual processes into AI-augmented workflows

• Contributions to knowledge sharing among the wider professional community through technical blogs or publications

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.