Senior Software Engineer, Backend Cisco
San Francisco, CA

Job Description

In order to be considered for this role, you MUST apply only on: http://grnh.se/rcsd211

Senior Software Engineer, Backend

San Francisco

Cisco Meraki has millions of cloud-managed enterprise-grade access points, switches, security appliances, phones, and cameras distributed across the world. Our devices are some of the most popular wireless and wired networking gear in the world.

Part of the reason why customers love Meraki is something we call the "Meraki magic": our devices are powerful, easy to use, and provide valuable visibility to our customers through Dashboard, the web app and cloud service supporting our devices. We can do what we do because we can modify the entire stack-from the UI to the backend on Dashboard all the way down to the device firmware itself. Because of this flexibility, combined with Meraki's ubiquity, we can provide all kinds of interesting insights, including the prevalence of a particular security threat, how common the latest 802.11 spec is, and which operating systems are most commonly used.

As we continue to grow from our startup roots, we face enormous scalability challenges. Every single day, our globally-distributed system handles tens of millions of Dashboard users, hundreds of millions of visitors clicking through a Meraki splash captive portal page, and tens of billions of responses from our devices worldwide that Dashboard checks in with more than once a minute, 24/7/365.

As a senior software engineer on the Backend team, you will be leading the charge to confront these challenges. You will architect, develop, scale, and maintain Dashboard and the lower-layer services and infrastructure that power it. You will have the opportunity to work on projects that span numerous domains: networking, databases, web app development, systems, and even approximation algorithms to help with the enormous amount of data that we handle. You can choose to work on the levels of the stack that interest you, from firmware to UI. Finally, you will get to have direct, immediate, and significant impact on our customers and the hundreds of millions of users that rely on the "Meraki magic" every single day.

Example projects for a Senior Backend Engineer:

* 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 and implementing 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
* Adding scalable proxies to redirect and load balance traffic from all our devices
* Adding new features or collecting and providing new metrics that take advantage of our ability to change the entire stack and seem like magic to our customers and users

You are an ideal candidate if you have:

* 5+ years of substantial work experience in software development, particularly in systems, networking, distributed systems, databases, or data processing frameworks
* Strong familiarity in at least one of the following languages: Scala, Ruby, Java, Python, C/C++, Go
* A focused, organized approach to development, testing, and quality
* Excellent communication and presentation skills
* Experience in analyzing, scaling, and debugging large systems processing lots of data
* Passion for the science in computer science

Bonus points for:

* A BS/MS/Ph.D in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a STEM field
* Meaningful personal projects or contributions to open-source projects
* Experience with web development and Javascript frameworks (e.g., ReactJS)
* Experience with devops/infrastructure tasks

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.