Software Engineer — Platform & Fleet Orchestrator

Develops software for the Platform Orchestrator and Fleet Orchestrator platforms with a focus on automation, reliability, scalability, security, and operational simplicity.

Builds and maintains services and automation capabilities that orchestrate cloud operations, infrastructure workflows, fleet-wide changes, and platform lifecycle activities. Applies Cisco software engineering and secure coding practices while designing solutions that are reliable, observable, maintainable, and easy for internal customers and service teams to use.

Partners with engineers, technical leads, product management, SRE/operations teams, and dependent platform teams to understand operational problems and translate them into scalable automation solutions.

Creates and maintains technical design documentation, runbooks, API and workflow documentation, and contributes to user-facing documentation required by teams consuming Platform Orchestrator and Fleet Orchestrator capabilities.

Debugs and resolves software and automation issues during development and in production environments. Participates in operational support, incident response, postmortems, and continuous reliability improvements.

Brings forward ideas for automation, simplification, platform capabilities, developer experience, and improvements to engineering and operational processes.

What You’ll Do

• Contributes to solving straightforward engineering and operational problems related to cloud orchestration, fleet management, infrastructure automation, platform services, and customer operations.

• Analyzes requirements and operational scenarios, asks questions, validates assumptions, and checks understanding before implementing solutions.

• Establishes effective working relationships within the Platform Orchestrator and Fleet Orchestrator teams and collaborates with dependent engineering and operations teams.

• Works independently or with guidance on small-to-medium features, automation workflows, APIs, integrations, or platform improvements from technical design through production delivery.

• Applies understanding of the complete software development lifecycle, including requirements analysis, technical design, implementation, automated testing, deployment, monitoring, and operational support.

• Participates in the design and implementation of distributed services, orchestration workflows, automation runbooks, APIs, event-driven integrations, and supporting platform components.

• Develops an understanding of how Platform Orchestrator and Fleet Orchestrator capabilities address operational and customer needs such as infrastructure lifecycle management, release orchestration, fleet-wide changes, maintenance activities, and automated remediation.

• Writes clean, maintainable, testable code and appropriate unit, integration, and workflow tests with guidance where required.

• Performs coding, debugging, testing, troubleshooting, and production issue analysis throughout the development lifecycle.

• Participates in code reviews, provides constructive feedback, and addresses review comments.

• Tests software and automation for reliability, scalability, performance, idempotency, failure handling, and safe execution at fleet scale.

• Applies secure coding principles and ensures solutions appropriately handle authentication, authorization, secrets, customer data, and privileged operational actions.

• Contributes to observability by implementing appropriate logging, metrics, tracing, dashboards, and alerts for owned components and workflows.

• Monitors and triages operational issues and incident reports and participates in postmortems, corrective actions, and on-call responsibilities where applicable.

• Develops deeper expertise in at least one component or capability within the Platform Orchestrator or Fleet Orchestrator ecosystem.

• Understands dependencies between orchestration services and other cloud platforms, infrastructure services, release systems, and operational tooling.

• Contributes to automation that reduces manual operational work and improves consistency, safety, and repeatability of cloud operations.

• Shares knowledge gained through development work, production incidents, technical investigations, and independent learning with the broader team.

• Creates and maintains technical documentation, including design documents, architecture decisions, runbooks, operational procedures, API documentation, and implementation notes.

• Estimates engineering assignments and communicates progress, risks, blockers, dependencies, and delays to the team.

• Identifies possible approaches to removing blockers and works with relevant teams to resolve dependencies and meet delivery commitments.

• Collaborates with engineers across teams to troubleshoot problems, share learnings, and improve common engineering and operational practices.

• Participates in continuous improvement of engineering processes, CI/CD pipelines, testing practices, deployment safety, developer experience, and platform reliability.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree plus 2 years of related software engineering experience, OR Master’s degree plus 0 years of related experience, or equivalent practical experience.

• Basic knowledge of software engineering principles, data structures, APIs, distributed systems, testing practices, and modern software development methodologies.

• Experience with or exposure to at least one general-purpose programming language such as Python, Go, Java, or similar.

• Basic understanding of cloud infrastructure, containers, APIs, CI/CD, or infrastructure automation concepts.

• Familiarity with Git-based development workflows, automated testing, and code review practices.

Preferred Qualifications

Preferred qualifications may vary based on specific Platform Orchestrator and Fleet Orchestrator responsibilities and business needs.

Examples include:

• Experience developing backend services, APIs, automation platforms, or distributed systems.

• Experience with Python, Go, Kubernetes, AWS, GitLab CI/CD, Terraform, or similar technologies.

• Understanding of cloud infrastructure lifecycle management and infrastructure-as-code practices.

• Experience with workflow orchestration, asynchronous processing, queues, event-driven systems, or automation frameworks.

• Familiarity with REST APIs, authentication and authorization mechanisms, service accounts, and secure secrets management.

• Understanding of reliability engineering concepts such as retries, idempotency, timeouts, failure domains, graceful degradation, and observability.

• Experience troubleshooting distributed production systems using logs, metrics, traces, and dashboards.

• Familiarity with production support, incident response, postmortems, and on-call engineering practices.

• Experience building automation used across large fleets or multiple cloud environments.

• Ability to understand operational processes and identify opportunities to replace manual procedures with safe, scalable automation.

• Strong communication and collaboration skills when working across engineering, operations, product management, and dependent service teams.

Why Cisco? 

At Cisco, we’re revolutionizing how data and infrastructure connect and protect organizations in the AI era – and beyond. We’ve been innovating fearlessly for 40 years to create solutions that power how humans and technology work together across the physical and digital worlds. These solutions provide customers with unparalleled security, visibility, and insights across the entire digital footprint.

Fueled by the depth and breadth of our technology, we experiment and create meaningful solutions. Add to that our worldwide network of doers and experts, and you’ll see that the opportunities to grow and build are limitless. We work as a team, collaborating with empathy to make really big things happen on a global scale. Because our solutions are everywhere, our impact is everywhere. 

We are Cisco, and our power starts with you.