Principal Engineer

At Cisco Meraki, we know that technology can connect, empower, and drive us. Our mission is to simplify technology so our customers can focus on what's most meaningful to them: their students, patients, customers, and businesses. We’re making networking easier, faster, and smarter with technology that simply works.

The modern world runs on the internet, and the internet cannot exist without its underlying infrastructure. Meraki makes setting up, managing, and maintaining that infrastructure easier than it has ever been before. Meraki enables connectivity everywhere from neighborhood cafes to education institutions to global hospitality groups operating thousands of sites.

The Opportunity:

You are an inspiring innovator, mentor, and coach, conversant and passionate about emerging opportunities. You lead by example and demonstrate excellence in collaboration and communication across engineering teams, with an interest in creative problem solving and a consistent track record for leading and directly chipping in to the launches of new platforms and/or transformational architecture changes. You are proficient at writing code and deploying it into a distributed architecture. You are also an effective spokesperson and champion for engineering teams, passionate about mentoring and developing engineers. You are an inspiring leader and a thorough problem solver who is equally comfortable and capable interacting with technologists as with senior business executives with the ability to articulate the value of the proposed solution. You value simplicity at scale and are dedicated to maintaining a culture of quality, reliability, security, and focused execution.

As a Principal Engineer You Will Be

• Leading by example and being a hands-on architect building systems alongside a team
• Chipping in significant amounts of production code and providing guidance to more junior engineers for code reviews.
• Applying advanced analytical thought and judgment to think beyond existing solutions
• Working with partners to set product vision, define, and deliver on technical roadmaps spanning multiple organizations or teams
• Providing technical leadership for critical platform and systems development
• Driving complex projects and leading a team of engineers.
• Articulating the architectural principles for SaaS-based capabilities
• Leading strategy and development in distributed large-scale cloud-native technology stacks
• Incubating, conceptualizing, planning, designing, and leading entrepreneurial projects
• Working in distributed architectures and working with data structures and algorithms
• Building and deploying critical, 24x7 solutions in a SaaS environment.
• Problem solving, debugging, and troubleshooting with advanced development skills
• Architecting and validating solutions which address the identified security challenges

We are looking for:

• You have 15+ years of related experience and are recognized as a strategic problem solver in internal and external forums, with extensive technical, market and business expertise.
• Experienced with modern application development methodologies (CI/CD, Agile/DevOps)
• Ability to get consensus and set technical direction across a large engineering organization
• Experienced in building from scratch and/or evolving large web applications and distributed services
• Experienced in building systems that operate performantly at scale

• Passionate about solving real customer problems and have experience prototyping, shipping, and iterating on new products
• Worked with relational or time-series databases before, either directly via SQL or an ORM.
• You’re experienced in an object-oriented or functional programming language.
• You take a focused, organized approach to development, testing, and quality.
• You have 8 years of experience working on large scale systems
• You enjoy mentoring and coaching other specialists, and leading large technical projects

We work with a mix of languages and technologies at Meraki including Ruby (and Rails), Scala, Go, PostgreSQL and Kafka. We know that everyone's tech stack is different and that skills translate. If you’ve used comparable technologies and like learning new things there's a good chance you’re an ideal fit for the team.

Bonus points for:

• Experience or willingness to work in an agile environment (Scrum, Kanban, etc.).
• Experience working with a real-time compute and streaming infrastructure (Kafka, Flink, Storm, Spark, etc).
• Experience with microservice architectures

Meraki is based in the Mission Bay area of San Francisco, with beautiful views of the Oracle Ballpark and the Bay beyond. You will have access to an onsite gym, multiple kitchens stocked with high quality snacks, a coffee bar, catered lunches every day, and a generous benefits package.