Technical Leader | Technical Leader: SONiC Platform Development| 12-15 years

Meet the Team

The Cisco Distributed System Engineering (DSE) group is at the forefront of developing products that power the largest networks in the world. The networking industry is going through an extensive transformation to build the next generation infrastructure to meet the needs of AI/ML workloads and continuously increasing internet users and application. We are uniquely positioned to assemble that market transition.

This team builds products by harnessing the potential of open-source technologies while pushing the boundaries on Systems and Silicon Architecture. They are the developers and leaders who are passionate about solving sophisticated technology, building large scale distributed systems and comfortable working with open-source communities and technologies.

Your Impact

You will be involved with a fast-paced work environment and responsible for end-to-end product development and production support. As a technical lead, you will be giving to the below activities:

Software Development & Integration:

• Be responsible for the design, development, and deployment of software solutions leveraging SONiC to work with hardware infrastructure and platform-level components.
• Develop and maintain platform adaptation layers for detailed integration between SONiC and underlying hardware (e.g., ASICs, BMC, optics modules, and other platform elements).
• Collaborate with hardware teams to enable optimal hardware-software interactions and expose hardware capabilities—including optical diagnostics and SerDes tunables—through SONiC interfaces.
• Write, review, and optimize code for critical system modules, drivers, and APIs supporting high-performance data planes and control planes.
• Implement support for optical module management (e.g., DOM, power budgeting, module fault handling) and SerDes tuning/configuration via SAI or platform-specific SDKs.
• Develop and maintain AN/LT (Auto-Negotiation and Link Training) logic integration across supported ASIC platforms for varied link bring-up.

System Architecture and Design

• Define the technical architecture to integrate SONiC with platform infrastructure, ensuring scalability and high availability.
• Design robust interfaces between SONiC and platform-specific management/control modules (e.g., telemetry, diagnostics, optics monitoring, and security components).
• Lead efforts to optimize resource utilization, power efficiency, and operational stability of the network platform.
• Architect solutions to support multiple optical form factors (QSFP-DD, OSFP, SFP-DD), breakout modes, and varying signaling rates (25G, 50G PAM4, 100G/lane) within SONiC's platform layer.

Leadership and Mentorship

• Provide technical direction to the development team, mentoring junior and mid-level engineers on software engineering standard methodologies and advanced networking concepts.
• Guide the team in debugging sophisticated link bring-up issues involving optics/SerDes/ANLT interactions across hardware and firmware layers.
• Coordinate multi-functional activities between software, hardware, QA, and systems integration teams.
• Drive code reviews, technical discussions, and issue resolution to ensure timely and quality work you're doing.

Collaboration and Stakeholder Engagement

• Act as a key liaison with open-source SONiC communities, giving to upstream development and demonstrating community innovations.
• Collaborate with product management and customers to understand use cases, capture requirements, and align work with business objectives—including emerging optics-related features such as CMIS support or link tuning APIs.
• Own the evaluation and adoption of new tools, technologies, and methodologies to accelerate development and testing cycles, particularly in optics and link performance diagnostics.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelors of Science
• 12+ years of experience in software development within the networking or telecommunications industry
• Expertise in C, C++, Python, Bash scripting
• Software development experience with Linux-based platforms or other network operating systems such as SONiC
• Experience with platform infrastructure such as ASIC drivers, BMC, and network OS development
• Familiarity with optical transceivers (QSFP-DD, OSFP, SFP+, etc.), SerDes configuration, and AN/LT debugging across vendor SDKs
• Experience working with virtualization, containerization, and orchestration frameworks such as Docker, Kubernetes, or similar
• Experience leading teams or technical projects in a sophisticated development environment

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in CI/CD pipelines and automated testing frameworks
• Experience with platform-level security requirements and compliance frameworks
• Understanding of telemetry systems and software-defined networking (SDN)
• Exposure to SONiC or experience working with the SONiC open-source community
• Knowledge of hardware abstraction layers and SDKs from major networking silicon providers (Broadcom, Marvell, Mellanox/NVIDIA, etc.)
• Experience with optical technologies including:
• CMIS management interface for modern optical modules
• SerDes tuning and signal integrity validation
• Auto-negotiation and link training on PAM4-based interfaces
• Breakout configurations and retimer behavior
• Troubleshooting link flaps and optical faults across high-speed interface

#WeAreCisco

#WeAreCisco where every individual brings their unique skills and perspectives together to pursue our purpose of powering an inclusive future for all.

Our passion is connection—we celebrate our employees’ diverse set of backgrounds and focus on unlocking potential. Cisconians often experience one company, many careers where learning and development are encouraged and supported at every stage. Our technology, tools, and culture pioneered hybrid work trends, allowing all to not only give their best, but be their best.

We understand our outstanding opportunity to bring communities together and at the heart of that is our people. One-third of Cisconians collaborate in our 30 employee resource organizations, called Inclusive Communities, to connect, foster belonging, learn to be advised allies, and make a difference. Dedicated paid time off to volunteer—80 hours each year—allows us to give back to causes we are passionate about, and nearly 86% do!