Software Engineer, Structured Storage at Cisco in RTP, North Carolina, US

Job description

• In this role, you will remain hands-on while leading end-to-end projects and medium-sized features, coordinating delivery across product, SRE, security, support, and engineering partners, and contributing to the team's defined roadmap.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, test, and operate well-scoped projects and small-to-medium features within the team's defined structured-storage roadmap.
• Develop versioned APIs and service components for graph, key-value, and related structured-storage services, covering authentication, routing, placement, policy, caching, and database lifecycle operations; contribute actively to design and code reviews.
• Own delivery from source to production by using CI/CD, secure container images, Kubernetes configuration, database migrations, rollout validation, and rollback plans.
• Improve reliability, scalability, security, performance, and cost efficiency using metrics, traces, logs, profiles, load tests, and customer or product-success signals.
• Troubleshoot complex production issues, periodically participate in the team's on-call rotation, and when appropriate lead postmortems, root-cause analysis, and corrective actions.
• Coordinate project specifications and timelines, keep stakeholders informed, surface risks early, and develop practical remediation options when delivery changes.
• Share knowledge through documentation, reviews, and technical discussions; mentor peers or interns and help strengthen engineering practices across the team.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree and 5+ years of related experience OR master's degree and 3+ years of related experience OR PhD.
• 3 years experience developing production backend services and versioned APIs in Go, C++, or another systems programming language.
• 3 years experience with at least one production graph, relational, or NoSQL database, including data modeling, queries, schema or data migrations, transactions, or performance tuning.
• 3 years experience deploying containerized services through CI/CD to Kubernetes or a comparable orchestration platform.
• 3 years experience diagnosing production issues with logs, metrics, or traces and participating in on-call or incident response.
• If you meet the core qualifications but not every preferred item, we still encourage you to apply.
• Experience building or operating distributed services in production, including failure handling, scalability, or recovery.
• Neo4j and Cypher experience, including graph modeling, clustering, topology, Bolt or Query API usage, database provisioning, page cache, and transaction metrics.
• PostgreSQL, Amazon Aurora, or RDS experience involving connection security, IAM authentication, migrations, tuning, backup, and restore.
• Experience with Helm, Kubernetes controllers or Operators, GitLab CI/CD, Terraform, Puppet, or similar delivery and configuration tooling.
• Experience operating services across one or more public clouds and on-premises environments, including service mesh, network policy, workload identity, or Vault integrations.
• Knowledge of database internals, storage engines, query planning, indexes, transaction logs, concurrency control, or large-scale performance testing.

Skills

Required

• Go
• C++
• systems programming language
• production backend services
• versioned APIs
• graph, relational, or NoSQL database
• data modeling
• queries
• schema or data migrations
• transactions
• performance tuning
• containerized services

Preferred

• distributed services
• failure handling
• scalability
• recovery
• Neo4j
• Cypher
• graph modeling
• clustering

Benefits

• 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. Please see the Cisco careers site to discover more benefits and perks. Employees may be eligible to receive grants of Cisco restricted stock units, which vest following continued employment with Cisco for defined periods of time.
• U.S. employees are eligible for paid time away as described below, subject to Cisco’s policies:
• 10 paid holidays per full calendar year, plus 1 floating holiday for non-exempt employees
• 1 paid day off for employee’s birthday, paid year-end holiday shutdown, and 4 paid days off for personal wellness determined by Cisco
• Non-exempt employees** receive 16 days of paid vacation time per full calendar year, accrued at rate of 4.92 hours per pay period for full-time employees
• Exempt employees participate in Cisco’s flexible vacation time off program, which has no defined limit on how much vacation time eligible employees may use (subject to availability and some business limitations)
• 80 hours of sick time off provided on hire date and each January 1st thereafter, and up to 80 hours of unused sick time carried forward from one calendar year to the next
• Additional paid time away may be requested to deal with critical or emergency issues for family members
• Optional 10 paid days per full calendar year to volunteer
• For non-sales roles, employees are also eligible to earn annual bonuses subject to Cisco’s policies.
• Employees on sales plans earn performance-based incentive pay on top of their base salary, which is split between quota and non-quota components, subject to the applicable Cisco plan. For quota-based incentive pay, Cisco typically pays as follows:
• .75% of incentive target for each 1% of revenue attainment up to 50% of quota;
• 1.5% of incentive target for each 1% of attainment between 50% and 75%;
• 1% of incentive target for each 1% of attainment between 75% and 100%; and
• Once performance exceeds 100% attainment, incentive rates are at or above 1% for each 1% of attainment with no cap on incentive compensation.
• For non-quota-based sales performance elements such as strategic sales objectives, Cisco may pay 0% up to 125% of target. Cisco sales plans do not have a minimum threshold of performance for sales incentive compensation to be paid.
• Message to applicants applying to work in the U.S. and/or Canada:
• The starting salary range posted for this position is $128,600.00 to $184,900.00 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. The full salary range for certain locations is listed below. For locations not listed below, the recruiter can share more details about compensation for the role in your location during the hiring process.
• The applicable full salary ranges for this position, by specific state, are listed below:
• $155,000.00 - $256,000.00
• $138,100.00 - $227,900.00
• * For quota-based sales roles on Cisco’s sales plan, the ranges provided in this posting include base pay and sales target incentive compensation combined.
• ** Employees in Illinois, whether exempt or non-exempt, will participate in a unique time off program to meet local requirements.