2 months ago
Bengaluru, IndiaSenior
Responsibilities
- Design, develop, and own scalable, reliable networking components and firmware/system software for Cisco switching products.
- Analyze requirements, evaluate technical trade-offs, and produce software designs, design documents, and functional specifications.
- Write C/C++ code and unit tests, apply white-box testing and automation, and debug bring-up issues, regressions, crashes, performance problems, and customer failures.
- Review product requirements, software specifications, test plans, and validation strategies with distributed engineering, system test, and quality teams.
- Improve product architecture, debuggability, performance, reliability, and engineering productivity.
- Own features through design, implementation, testing, rollout, production support, and customer support; mentor engineers and contribute to design and code reviews.
Requirements
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, EE/ECE, or a related field.
- Typically 8-12 years of relevant software or firmware development experience.
- Strong hands-on proficiency in C/C++, data structures, algorithms, object-oriented design, memory management, and debugging.
- Experience developing firmware, embedded software, or system software for networking products.
- Strong system design skills and the ability to independently own feature- or component-level architecture.
- Experience with concurrent programming, multithreading, synchronization, and IPC/RPC mechanisms.
- Strong L2/L3 networking knowledge, including Ethernet, VLANs, STP/RSTP, LACP/LAG, ARP, IPv4/IPv6, routing fundamentals, packet flow, and network troubleshooting.
- Linux/system programming fundamentals and hands-on debugging with GDB, core dumps, packet captures, Wireshark/tcpdump, and traffic generators or analyzers such as IXIA.
- Demonstrated ownership of medium-to-large technical features and the ability to mentor engineers and contribute to design and code reviews.
- Hands-on experience with GenAI-assisted development tools such as Codex, GitHub Copilot, Claude, or equivalent.
- Preferred experience with VLAN, STP/RSTP/MST, LACP/LAG, UDLD, Storm Control, QoS, OSPF, BGP, ECMP, multicast, DHCP relay, SLAAC, or VRRP.
- Preferred experience with Python or another scripting language for test automation, debugging, tooling, or developer productivity.
- Hardware/software bring-up, SDK/ASIC interaction, packet processing, high-performance data-plane software, and Cisco networking certifications such as CCNA, CCNP, or CCIE are desirable.
About Cisco
Cisco designs and sells networking, security, and collaboration platforms for enterprises, service providers, and governments, spanning routers and switches, Wi‑Fi, firewalls, zero‑trust, observability, and cloud-managed IT (Meraki) plus Webex. Its business model mixes hardware, software subscriptions, and support/consulting services. Founded in 1984 and headquartered in San Jose, California, Cisco is a public company traded on Nasdaq and serves customers across data centers, campuses, and service provider networks.