Leader, Software Engineering

Lead the founding operations organization building Cisco’s next-generation multi-cloud networking platform from the ground up. As a Senior Engineering Manager for MCN Operations, you’ll set the operational strategy and lead a cross-functional team of DevOps, SRE, QA, and Backend Operations engineers ensuring operational excellence across AWS, Azure, and GCP-handling billions of daily transactions across 9+ global regions. Your Impact: Own the operational foundation for MCN’s Alpha launch in Early 2026, scaling it through Beta and GA. You’ll drive reliability, cost efficiency, and incident readiness building a team and operating model that delivers Meraki’s legendary reliability to thousands of customer networks. What You’ll Do You will lead and scale an India-based operations team (with global partners) spanning DevOps, SRE, QA, and Backend Ops. As MCN grows, you’ll shape team structure, hiring plans, on-call coverage, and cross-team execution. Operational Strategy & Accountability: Define and deliver the operational strategy for Alpha → Beta → GA, including service reliability, on-call readiness, and operational maturity Lead & Scale the Org: Hire, coach, and retain a high-performing operations org; establish clear ownership, career paths, and a culture of high standards and sustainable execution Drive Cross-Org Alignment: Partner with engineering leadership, architecture, product, security, and support to align priorities, manage trade-offs, and ensure operational needs are baked into the roadmap Reliability, SLOs, and Incident Leadership: Establish SLOs/SLIs, escalation paths, and incident response processes; lead postmortems and drive systemic fixes that improve resilience and reduce toil Multi-Cloud Operational Excellence: Ensure consistent deployment, observability, and troubleshooting across AWS, Azure, and GCP with strong automation and runbook discipline Cost & Capacity Management: Drive capacity planning and cost management for multi-region infrastructure; build feedback loops and dashboards that make cost/reliability trade-offs visible and actionable Architecture Leadership: Guide technical direction and decisions with leads and senior ICs, ensuring designs meet reliability, security, and operability expectations AI-Native Operations Leadership: Champion development of MCP servers and AI agents for intelligent monitoring, automated troubleshooting, and predictive capacity planning—turning ops signals into proactive actions Minimum Qualifications 10+ years of software development or operations experience with distributed systems, networking, cloud infrastructure 6+ years of hands-on technical experience with backend/infrastructure (Go, Python, C/C++) and cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) 4+ years of people leadership experience managing DevOps/SRE/Operations teams (or leading multiple high-impact operational initiatives across teams) Proven track record operating production services at scale across regions and/or cloud providers, including incident leadership and driving systemic reliability improvements Strong networking fundamentals - TCP/IP stack, routing (BGP), VPN (IPsec), SD-WAN Demonstrated ability to lead through ambiguity: set priorities, align stakeholders, and deliver outcomes on high-stakes timelines Outstanding communication and influence—able to align technical and non-technical stakeholders and drive adoption of best practices Preferred Qualification Experience setting SLOs/SLIs, building operational maturity programs, and reducing toil through automation Multi-cloud deployment and operations (AWS + Azure + GCP), including multi-region rollout planning High-performance networking or data plane operations (VPP knowledge is a plus) Security and compliance experience for cloud operations, including secrets management and access control practices Vendor/partner management experience (e.g., contractors or hybrid teams) Bonus points for the following Led geographically distributed teams across time zones, wi ... (truncated, view full listing at source)