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, with strong execution and healthy engineering culture
- Built durable operational systems: on-call models, runbooks, incident management, and continuous improvement loops
- Delivered reliability improvements through automation (CI/CD, IaC, observability-as-code) and reduced operational toil
- Built or led development of MCP servers or AI agents for operational automation
- Conference speaking or technical writing on SRE/DevOps/operations leadership
Tech Stack
- Core: Go, Python, Kubernetes, Terraform, Prometheus, Grafana
Languages: Python, Go, Ruby (Dashboard), C/C++ (VPP), Rust
Cloud: AWS, Azure, GCP
Tools: Docker, Ansible, GitHub Actions, Thanos, ELK, Kafka - We know everyone’s stack is different and skills translate. If you’ve led operations teams at scale and love learning, you’re likely a great fit.
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.
