Technical Leader Sonic Platform Development jobs at Cisco in India, Bengaluru

In this role, you will work with Cisco's CService Provider customers and collaborate with various teams, including Customer Expeirnece, product engineering, and the Sales. Our collaboration aims to improve overall experience of customers with Cisco’s Product and Services. Furthermore, you will work with the global Support team to ensure a seamless experience for our customers.

• Resolve customer issues remotely via email, phone, or collaboration tools such as Cisco Webex.
• Use Cisco labs to replicate customer-reported issues and test software fixes provided by the engineering team.
• Work effectively with Cisco engineering teams to resolve product-related issues and submit serviceability enhancements based on customer feedback and technical insights.
• Create and document troubleshooting procedures for new and common problems to assist junior engineers and enhance team knowledge
• Collaborate with technical leaders to support efforts in automation and innovation within the team.

• Bachelor's degree in a Engineering (Computer Science or Information Technology preferred).
• A minimum of 8 years of related industry experience, with at least 4 years of experience working with Cisco routing products such as ASR 9000, NCS 5000, and NCS 540.
• CCIE/CCNP certification or an industry equivalent is preferred, demonstrating advanced expertise and technical skills in networking.
• Requires knowledge of Cisco routing products and proficiency with their command line interface (CLI).
• Possesses working knowledge of Python scripting and automation.
• Basic understanding of AI tools.

• Possesses a solid understanding of IP networking concepts, including IPv4, IPv6, Multicast, ARP, QoS, and device-level security.
• Experienced with service provider technologies such as routing protocols (BGP, OSPF, IS-IS), MPLS, L3VPN, L2VPN,Segment-Routing and IPv6 routing.
• Possesses working knowledge of software programmability, automation, orchestration, and/or virtualization.
• Candidates with prior Technical Assistance Center (TAC) experience from a product-based company are preferred.
• Excellent written, verbal, interpersonal, and presentation skills, with a developing ability to function effectively in ambiguous circumstances.

As a key member of Cisco IOS XR Platform Independent Software Development team, you will:

• Collaborate with account teams, product management, other engineering team, architect and design sophisticated product requirements/challenges.
• Demonstrate strong technical leadership via innovative solutions to customer problems including successful deployment.
• Partner with other senior architects across Cisco on new opportunities and broad initiatives.
• Be in the forefront of development of complex projects, working with managers for detailed planning and execution strategy, identify intermediate, well-defined achievements.
• Act as a mentor and develop strong technical talent, leading towards development of long-term expertise, technical competency.
• Do innovation within the team and chip in to Cisco’s intellectual property.
• Strengthen product quality by identifying hot spots and deriving solution for the same.
• Keep up to date with technology trends relevant to the group, adopt newer technologies and rapid prototyping to demonstrate.

• BE/B.Tech or higher degree in CS/EC or equivalent with 18+ years in the networking or equivalent domains
• An accomplished technical leader with experience in building resilient, scalable, and secure platforms using opensource and commercial software
• Extensive experience in architecting and design of complex networking systems and various software engineering principles
• In-depth knowledge and understanding of routing and switching technologies, including SR, SRv6, EVPN, MPLS, VXLAN, various L2/L3 protocols
• Expert and experience in C/C++, Python, Linux system programming, process and memory management, multithreading

• You believe in codifying and automation (infra as code) and have the approach that anything is possible till validated otherwise
• You are willing to explore unknowns quickly, be a sounding board and dependable consultant on wide range of product ideas
• Experience with kernel programming and open-source technologies is a plus

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:

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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

• 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