Senior Software Architect & Technical Leader - Kubernetes Platform

About the role

Cisco is looking for a Senior Software Architect and Technical Leader to join its platform engineering team in Israel. You will provide hands-on technical leadership in evolving a Kubernetes-based platform for enterprise network applications, shaping how applications integrate with and operate across cloud, hybrid, edge and customer-managed environments.

Key responsibilities

• Define platform architecture, technical strategy and multi-release roadmaps, turning product and operational needs into designs and implementation plans.
• Design and evolve Kubernetes capabilities: cluster lifecycle, controllers and reconciliation, custom resources, scheduling, networking, storage, service discovery and upgrades.
• Lead the design and development of shared platform services for connectivity, identity and access management, distributed data, observability, lifecycle automation and administration.
• Improve reliability and security through high availability, recovery, backup and restore, capacity planning, production debugging, threat modeling and vulnerability remediation.
• Prepare the platform for future AI workloads through workload isolation, resource governance, secure model serving, telemetry and accelerator support.
• Raise engineering standards through hands-on development, design and code reviews, automated testing, CI/CD, incident analysis, mentoring and AI-assisted engineering workflows.

Required profile

• Bachelor's degree and 8+ years of relevant experience, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years building, operating or extending production Kubernetes platforms.
• Proven technical leadership of complex, cross-team initiatives from architecture through production.
• Strong expertise in distributed systems, Linux, containers, networking, security, CI/CD and production troubleshooting.
• Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development tools and agentic engineering workflows.

Required skills

• Deep Kubernetes knowledge and strong Go and/or Java development experience.
• Preferred: Kubernetes operators, controllers and custom platform APIs; distributed databases, messaging, consensus or dynamic routing technologies; identity and service security in restricted-connectivity or air-gapped environments; supporting data-intensive or AI workloads on Kubernetes.

You will join a globally distributed team in Israel, the United States and Europe, working with engineering, product, architecture, security, quality, support and customer-facing teams. Occasional schedule flexibility is required for collaboration with U.S. colleagues.