Software Engineering Manager, Backend
San Francisco, CA

Job Description

At Cisco Meraki, you will lead and scale out a team that is responsible for high-impact scalability and reliability challenges that face Meraki's Dashboard-our web application and cloud infrastructure powering the millions of Dashboard-powered Meraki products that serve hundreds of millions of client devices every day. Our devices are some of the most popular in the world, and, in the last three years alone, the number of active Meraki devices has increased by nearly four-fold. This popularity comes with large scalability challenges: our globally-distributed backend makes and handles tens of billions of requests to our devices daily, 24/7/365.

As a software engineering manager on the Backend team, you will work on the organizational and technical challenges that come with scaling a team and our infrastructure. You will represent and lead the team by providing input on and making decisions about team direction and projects. You will build out the team by recruiting, interviewing, and hiring. You will mentor and develop engineers through meaningful career development and continuous feedback. You will review high-level technical designs and architectural decisions. You will be exposed to numerous domains-networking, databases, web app development, and systems-and all parts of the stack-from the Dashboard UI and backend down to the device firmware itself. Finally, you will make a significant impact on our customers and users that rely on Meraki access points, switches, security appliances, and cameras every single day.

At Meraki, we are passionate about building real products that our customers love. We believe in fostering a positive culture by hiring, coaching, and empowering smart, helpful, humble people and providing equal opportunities for all employees to thrive. With the support of management, we constantly look within for ways to improve organizationally. We maintain a positive relationship with Cisco that gives us the stability and resources of a larger company without sacrificing our startup vibe-including a beautiful office overlooking the Bay Bridge with delicious catered meals, fully-stocked kitchens, an onsite gym, and paid time off to volunteer. We are confident you will love it here.

Example projects on the Backend team:

* Adding Bloom filters or smarter caching to further scale the high-throughput of LittleTable, our custom time-series relational database that stores 100 of TB's of data
* Scaling MTunnel, the custom VPN-like infrastructure that provides secure connectivity between our globally-distributed servers and our devices, by profiling where the CPU is spending most of its time and judiciously parallelizing portions that would provide the most benefit
* Designing approximation algorithms that calculate the top clients by usage with provable bounds on error or number of distinct devices seen across multiple days
* Architecting and implementing scalable gossip and data dissemination protocols for propagating data across our backend servers

You are an ideal candidate if you have:

* 5+ years of work experience in software development, particularly in systems, networking, distributed systems, databases, and/or data processing frameworks
* 2+ years of leadership experience as a mentor, tech lead, people manager, or a champion of high-impact initiatives
* Excellent communication and presentation skills
* Product/project management skills and an understanding of how to balance product requests and deadlines against internal priorities
* A high-level of emotional intelligence and empathy for others
* A strong belief in leading by example

Bonus points for:

* A BS/MS/Ph.D in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a STEM field
* Familiarity in at least one of the following languages: Scala, Ruby, Java, Python, C/C++, Go
* Experience in scaling engineering organizations
* A focused, organized approach to development, testing, and quality
* Experience in analyzing and scaling large systems, web development, Javascript frameworks (e.g., ReactJS), or dev-ops/infrastructure tasks
* Passion for the science in computer science

Cisco is an Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity Employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, genetic information, age, disability, veteran status, or any other legally protected basis. Cisco will consider for employment, on a case by case basis, qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.