Principal Software Engineer

Strategic Technical Leader For Developer Experience And Gitops

This role serves as a strategic leader for developer experience and GitOps within Cisco Collaboration, tasked with aligning platform architecture with critical business, security, and operational goals. You will spearhead enterprise-scale initiatives to modernize the engineering lifecycle, optimizing how teams build, deploy, and secure services across Kubernetes and VM-based environments. By defining robust reference architectures and governance models, you will standardize CI/CD automation, secrets management, and deployment visibility to drive engineering excellence. Beyond technical design, you will act as a key advisor to senior leadership, resolving complex organizational blockers and influencing teams through mentorship and cross-functional decision-making. This position is particularly exciting because it offers the opportunity to build the future of developer efficiency by driving the adoption of AI-assisted workflows and modern delivery models. Ultimately, you will represent the platform strategy to stakeholders, ensuring that these investments deliver measurable business outcomes and improved release velocity.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree with 15+ years of relevant experience, Master's degree with 12+ years, or PhD with 8+ years of experience in software engineering.
• 10+ years in full-stack development, including backend systems using Java or Spring Boot and frontend interfaces using React, Angular, or Vue.js.
• Production experience crafting and delivering APIs, services, and platform workflows for large-scale enterprise environments.
• Previous enterprise implementation of CI/CD pipelines and Git-based release automation using tools such as GitHub Actions.
• Ownership of architecting and handling containerized, cloud-native applications within Kubernetes and distributed system environments.

Preferred Qualifications

• Production experience with GitOps-based delivery using Argo CD or equivalent platforms.
• Experience with HashiCorp Vault or comparable secrets-management technologies.
• Experience with Helm, Kustomize, Terraform, Ansible, or other infrastructure and deployment automation tools.
• Experience supporting both Kubernetes-based and VM-based deployment models at enterprise scale.
• Breadth across platform engineering, developer experience, release engineering, security, observability, and operational readiness.
• Experience defining technical standards, reference architectures, adoption plans, and success metrics for internal developer platforms.
• Ability to anticipate business and industry changes, connect technical strategy to product outcomes, and develop innovative approaches beyond existing solutions.
• Practical experience with AI-assisted development, agentic workflows, or automation patterns that improve engineering productivity while maintaining governance and security standards.
• Strong mentoring presence and demonstrated ability to raise engineering quality across teams through influence, review, and technical guidance.