Technical Leader: SONiC Platform Development

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 a massive 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 capture 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 tackling complex 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 involved on the following activities. Software Development & Integration

• Lead the design, development, and deployment of software solutions leveraging SONiC to interface with hardware infrastructure and platform-level components.
• Develop and maintain platform adaptation layers for seamless integration between SONiC and underlying hardware (e.g., ASICs, BMC, and other platform elements).
• Collaborate with hardware teams to enable optimal hardware-software interactions and expose hardware capabilities through SONiC interfaces.
• Write, review, and optimize code for critical system modules, drivers, and APIs supporting high-performance data planes and control planes.

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, and security components).
- Lead efforts to optimize resource utilization, power efficiency, and operational stability of the network platform.

Leadership and Mentorship

- Provide technical direction to the development team, mentoring junior and mid-level engineers on software engineering best practices and advanced networking concepts.
- Coordinate cross-functional activities between software, hardware, QA, and systems integration teams.
- Drive code reviews, technical discussions, and issue resolution to ensure timely and quality deliverables.

Collaboration and Stakeholder Engagement

- Act as a key liaison with open-source SONiC communities, contributing to upstream development and leveraging community innovations.
- Collaborate with product management and customers to understand use cases, gather requirements, and align deliverables with business objectives.
- Lead the evaluation and adoption of new tools, technologies, and methodologies to accelerate development and testing cycles.

Minimum Qualifications

- Around 15 years of experience in software development within the networking or telecommunication industry
- Software development experience with Linux based platforms or other like network operating systems such as SONiC
- Experience with platform infrastructure such as ASIC drivers, NPU, BMC, Optics and network OS development
- Experience working with virtualization, containerization, and orchestration frameworks such as Docker, Kubernetes and/or similar
- Experience leading teams or technical projects in a complex 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 (such as Broadcom, Marvell, Mellanox etc)