Cloud Engineer - 4 to 8yrs - Java, Python, AI Tools, Distributed Systems, Docker, Kubernetes

Overview

Design, build and operate the real-time cloud services underneath Cisco's AI Agent platform, which hold live two-way voice and chat sessions and take actions in business systems through APIs, at enterprise scale across multiple regions.

What you'll do

• Design, build and operate core real-time services in Java (Java 21, Quarkus) and Python, such as streaming session orchestration, audio and message streaming, integration and callback execution, and usage and quota metering.
• Lead the technical design of the services and features you own: write the spec (contracts, state model, failure modes, capacity, rollout and rollback), drive its review, split it into deliverable increments and lead the implementation.
• Raise the bar for spec-driven development: decide when a change needs a spec, review other engineers' specs, and keep design docs and API/Protobuf contracts accurate as the system evolves.
• Own the team's use of AI coding tools: structure specs and repository guidance so the tools produce correct, reviewable changes, and set the review and test standards for AI-generated code.
• Engineer for real-time scale: sub-second latency, many concurrent long-lived streaming sessions and multi-region deployment, using bounded resources, idempotency, backpressure, circuit breaking and graceful degradation.
• Integrate third-party and partner services behind clean adapters with failover, and use latency, reliability and cost data to drive provider and design decisions.
• Define the test and release strategy for your areas: functional, load and uncertainty test gates, plus canary rollout and rollback readiness.
• Own production health for your services (SLOs, dashboards and alerts), and lead high-severity incident investigations and root-cause analysis through to permanent fixes.
• Mentor engineers through design and code reviews, and shape roadmap, estimates and cross-team decisions with architects, product management, SRE, security and the product teams that use the platform.

What you'll need

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field, or equivalent practical experience, with 4+ years of professional backend software development, including ownership of production services.
• Strong experience in Java (Java 17 or later): you have designed, built and operated production microservices with Quarkus, Spring Boot or a similar framework, including concurrent and asynchronous code.
• Hands-on experience in Python in production services, tooling or test automation.
• Experience designing distributed systems: microservices, streaming or event-driven communication (such as gRPC, WebSockets or Kafka), and failure handling with timeouts, retries and idempotency.
• Strong experience running production workloads with Docker and Kubernetes on a public cloud (AWS, Azure or Google Cloud).
• Spec-driven development: you have written specs and design docs before implementation, led their review, and can coach other engineers to work this way.
• AI-assisted development: you use AI tools such as GitHub Copilot, Cursor, ChatGPT or Codex daily, and you can set practical team guidelines for using them safely and productively.

Nice to have

• Quarkus, gRPC with Protocol Buffers, and long-lived bidirectional streaming.
• Reactive and concurrent Java at scale: Vert.x, Mutiny or Project Reactor, and virtual threads.
• Large-scale, multi-tenant, multi-region SaaS, including capacity planning, SLOs and error budgets.
• Real-time communications and media: WebRTC, SIP, audio streaming and media servers.
• API gateways, rate limiting, usage metering and quota enforcement.
• Kafka, Redis, PostgreSQL and MongoDB, including transactional outbox and other event-driven patterns.
• Helm, Terraform, Argo CD, Jenkins or GitHub Actions, with multifaceted delivery and feature flags.
• Observability with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger or Splunk.
• Load, endurance and uncertainty testing, including dependency simulators for performance testing.
• Security for multi-tenant SaaS: OWASP Top 10, OAuth 2.0 and JWT, secrets management and tenant isolation.
• Experience building shared platforms or APIs used by other product teams.
• Patents, open-source contributions or conference talks.

Details

• Location: Bangalore, India.