Principal Software Engineer - Isovalent

The application window is expected to close on: 06/05/2026 Job posting may be removed earlier if the position is filled or if a sufficient number of applications are received. Meet the Team Iovalent, now part of Cisco, is the company founded by the creators of Cilium and eBPF. Cisco Secure Workload is a flagship security product offering workload protection, micro‑segmentation, and is part of the Hybrid Mesh Firewall solution. Cisco Isovalent and Cisco Secure Workload are together building the next generation of products for securing workloads and AI infrastructure. We believe in fostering an inclusive and diverse workplace where every team member feels valued, respected, and empowered. We believe that every employee contributes to our success, and we are committed to fostering an environment where everyone can thrive. We encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply and join us in our mission to deliver exceptional products and services. Your Impact We are a highly dynamic engineering organization that works on building software for workload security products that cater to highly complex and scalable customer environments to protect their crown jewel application workloads from increasingly complex threat vectors. As a Principal Engineer with our Backend Services team, you will work with and provide technical leadership to a team of highly motivated engineers working on solutions to ship or deploy for our customers, with a focus on improving Scale, Performance, Reliability, Robustness, and, most importantly, Security. In this role you’ll act as a SME, advising on technical vision, roadmaps, leadership, and make architectural contributions in backend services that: Collect and process telemetry at scale from data sources in customer environments React to changes in environment and render policies in highly scalable manner to large number of enforcement points Implement API endpoints that need to respond with minimal latencies even when crunching large volumes of data. Will be deployed in highly complex distributed system environments and involve failure modes unique to those environments. Minimum Qualifications At least 10+ years' experience building software systems in one or more programming languages such as Go, C++, or Java. At least 5+ years in a technical leadership role in a software engineering environment Masters + 10 years related experience, or Bachelors + 12 years of related experience, or PhD + 5 years related experience or equivalent related work experience; degree to be in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field. Agile experience Preferred Qualifications Proficiency in Computer Science foundational areas, including algorithms, systems, databases, performance engineering and security architecture Schema/Data modeling design experience Experience with large-scale event processing architectures Experience in systems programming and performance engineering Experience working with security architecture and database design Kubernetes experience Experience programming using cloud APIs for AWS, Azure, or GCP A technical leader who embraces agile methodologies that involve rapid prototyping by feedback gathered from customers, peers and technical solution architects, customer enablement engineers and support engineers. A software engineering technical leader enjoys architecting, designing, analyzing, and brainstorming solutions that improve the product and produce customer‑facing capabilities. #J-18808-Ljbffr Cisco Systems, Inc.