at Cisco ThousandEyes

The name ThousandEyes was born from two big ideas: the power to see things not ordinarily possible and the ability to collect insights from a multitude of vantage points. As the world continues its digital transformation and relies more on cloud services and the Internet, the “network,” which is now both public and private, has become a black box our customers cannot see or understand.  

Our Internet and cloud intelligence platform delivers the only collectively powered real-time view of the Internet and private networks, cloud, and SaaS platforms, helping enterprises and service providers identify problems before they impact revenue, damage brand reputation, or halt employee productivity. 

In August 2020, Cisco Systems completed the acquisition of ThousandEyes, which now forms the ThousandEyes Business Unit within the Cisco Networking Business Group and is the Network Assurance solution for Cisco across the Cisco Networking Cloud and Cisco Security Cloud. ThousandEyes is also a foundational component of Cisco’s growing Full-Stack Observability (“FSO”) business. 

Cloud Ops SRE team is focused on driving holistic cloud operations focused on reliability and efficiencies around the ThousandEyes cloud infrastructure and platform. The team is responsible for driving tooling, processes and standards that are crosscutting and critical for the reliability of the ThousandEyes platform defining how we operate. From driving AMI generation and OS standardization to the strategic approach of how ThousandEyes implements FinOps or operational excellence through metric-driven alert/error budgets.

As the technical lead, the key responsibility is to innovate and provide technical vision by collaborating to build reliable, scalable, and highly available infrastructure and cloud networks on a constantly growing multi-region platform.

As the technical Lead of the Cloud Ops SRE team, you will spearhead efforts to ensure the reliability and efficiency of ThousandEyes' cloud infrastructure and platform. You will provide strategic direction in driving tooling, processes, and standards essential for operational excellence. Leading initiatives such as AMI generation, OS standardization, FinOps implementation, and metric-driven approaches, you will play a pivotal role in shaping ThousandEyes' cloud operations strategy. Your leadership will facilitate cross-functional collaboration and foster a culture of continuous improvement within the team.

We’re looking for a reliability-focused SRE to focus on automation and help drive Cloudops to take operational excellence to a new level. 

Here are some of the main things we are looking for:

• Deep knowledge around cloud operations. You have a cloud first mindset and experience building and supporting SaaS platforms operating out of cloud environments. You are able to design and architect best in class systems and frameworks that simplify how ThousandEyes operates in the cloud at a multi-region scale. 
• Tooling, Processes, and Standards: Drive the development and adoption of tools, processes, and standards that enhance the reliability and efficiency of the ThousandEyes cloud infrastructure.Collaborate with cross-functional teams to identify areas for improvement and implement solutions that streamline operations and increase reliability.
• Operational Excellence through Metric-Driven Approaches:Define and implement metric-driven approaches to operational excellence, leveraging key performance indicators (KPIs) and error budgets to drive reliability improvements.Establish and maintain alerting systems based on predefined thresholds and error budgets, enabling proactive response to potential issues before they impact customers.
• Strong technical vision. You can collaborate with and beyond the team to formulate a compelling vision for the systems the team owns. You have the communication skills to sell it and to make sure it is represented in the team’s strategy and roadmap.
• Expert in reliability. This is a hands-on role, so you will be excited by the opportunity to write software, automate and build reliable systems in order to enable our platform to scale effortlessly. Think self service. You will have many examples of successfully delivering complex systems. 
• Natural collaborator. It takes a village to do anything worthwhile, and you’re happy working across Engineering and Product Management to help shape the future direction of the platform.
• Effective mentor. You have a passion to up-level the team and those around you. You are open to learning as well…nobody is an expert at everything.

• Ability to design and implement scalable and well tested solutions, with focus on streamlining operations.
• Strong hands on experience in cloud preferably AWS, 
• Ability to write high quality code in Python, Go, or equivalent languages.
• Strong Infrastructure as Code skills, ideally with Terraform and Kubernetes.
• Expertise in configuration management tools like Puppet.
• Deep knowledge of cloud security best practices and compliance standards.
• Good understanding of Unix/Linux systems, the kernel, system libraries, file systems, and client-server protocols.
• Bonus points for candidates with experience in handling BigData workloads in AWS.
• Strong communication and documentation skills.