Observability Solution Architect – Technical Literacy
Core Technical Prerequisites
- Strong command of observability fundamentals - MELT, including correlation, sampling, and high-cardinality control.
- Hands-on expertise with OpenTelemetry across instrumentation, collectors, and context propagation.
- Strong architectural intuition for large-scale distributed systems and microservices failure modes.
- Deep practical understanding of cloud-native and Kubernetes observability.
- Working knowledge of APM internals and runtime instrumentation (Java, .NET, Node.js, Python).
- Experience architecting high-throughput telemetry ingestion, storage, and query pipelines.
- Strong grasp of observability data models and query pattern based analytics.
- Applied use of AI/ML in observability for baselining, anomaly detection, and alert noise reduction.
- Advanced familiarity with Kubernetes networking and service mesh observability.
- Exposure to eBPF or kernel-level telemetry and zero-instrumentation techniques.
- Capability to map technical telemetry to business transactions and user journeys.
- Clear understanding of security, privacy, and multi-tenant data isolation.
- Proven integration experience with CI/CD, incident management, and ITSM ecosystems.
- Strong grasp of performance overhead, telemetry cost controls, and FinOps alignment.
Nice-to-Have (Strong Differentiators)
- Experience operating observability platforms at very large scale (multi-region, multi-tenant).
- Prior ownership of production SRE or platform incidents, including postmortems.
- Experience designing observability for regulated or high-compliance domains.
- Involvement in customer migrations from competing observability platforms.
- Ability to influence product roadmap using field and customer insights.
- Experience correlating telemetry with SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, and business KPIs.
- Use of observability data for cost optimization and FinOps initiatives.
- Contributions to open-source observability projects or public technical content.
- Relevant Industry Certification in Otel, Hyperscalers, Data domains.
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.
