AI Operations Engineer - C3

Meet the Team

The Dev Ops team within Cisco's newly formed AI Software and Platform group designs and operates the infrastructure that powers Cisco's exciting array of AI powered offerings, such as AI Defense, AI Canvas, and AI Assistants. Within the Dev Ops team, our Cloud Platform and Observability group provides all the necessary insights to power our services with metrics, traces, and logs, ensuring our services are observable and that the key metrics and workflows are fully monitored.

We're looking for an expert in observability to define the vision for our platform and see it implemented by partnering with all parts of the AI Software and Platform group, delivering technical solutions, and improving on what great looks like.

• Deliver 100% coverage of distributed tracing in partnership with the software development teams, ensuring that all services are instrumented in the most optimal way.
• Own a set of libraries, process documents, and design patterns that enable rapid adoption of Open Telemetry within our Go and Python applications.
• Drive best practices across all aspects of the platform, including cardinality management, logging standards, and ensuring what's most useful is monitored.
• Operate the Observability platform components, such as our Splunk Platform and Splunk Observability offerings, OTEL collectors, and other telemetry pipelines.
• Drive an agentic observability outcome, where agents are able to create insights around the health of our observability and deliver distilled information even more rapidly than traditional dashboards and alerts.

• Bachelors +7 years working in a platform services or Dev Ops role, with specific ownership of observability
• Expertise in Splunk Cloud and Splunk Observability. You've used Splunk Cloud for logging and Splunk Observability for metrics and traces.
• Understanding of distributed tracing concepts and implementation. You know that good tracing starts with ensuring all services are instrumented, but also know that there's a balance to tracing everything.
• Hands‑on coding with Python and/or Golang. While the job won't be writing code all day, there are libraries, implementations, and other code to be written to make our platform robust.
• Passionate about AI‑assisted development. You'll be using a wide array of AI assistants, coding tools, and agentic approaches to developing and maintaining the platform, so come ready to multiply your outcomes with these tools.

• Driven large scale (100+ microservices) distributed tracing initiatives across an organization
• Experience with using AI agents to continually refine observability outcomes
• Understanding of LLM observability, particularly OpenAI, Bedrock, and other major providers
• Deep understanding of AWS and its various services

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.

The starting salary range posted for this position is $ to $ and reflects the projected salary range for new hires in this position in U.S. and/or Canada locations, not including incentive compensation, equity or benefits.

Individual pay is determined by the candidate's hiring location, market conditions, job‑related skillset, experience, qualifications, education, certifications, and/or training.

U.S. employees are offered benefits, subject to Cisco's plan eligibility rules, which include medical, dental and vision insurance, a 401(k) plan with a Cisco matching contribution, paid parental leave, short and long‑term disability coverage, and basic life insurance. Employees may be eligible to receive grants of Cisco restricted stock units, which vest following continued employment with Cisco for defined periods of time.