Tetragon Software Engineering Technical Leader

Meet the Team Isovalent, now part of Cisco, is the company founded by the creators of Cilium and eBPF. Cisco Isovalent builds open-source software and enterprise solutions solving networking, security, and observability needs for modern cloud native infrastructure. The flagship technologies, Cilium and Tetragon, are the choice of numerous, industry-leading, global organizations.

We believe in fostering an inclusive workplace where every team member feels valued, respected, and empowered. We believe that every employee contributes to our success, and we are committed to fostering an environment where everyone can thrive. We encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply and join us in our mission to deliver exceptional products and services.

Your Impact Tetragon is a flexible, Kubernetes-aware observability and security tool that delivers real-time insights and enforcement. Leveraging the power of eBPF, Tetragon provides low-overhead, in-kernel visibility and intelligence across diverse environments.

As a Technical Leader, you will be at the forefront of advancing Tetragon’s capabilities. You will guide architectural direction while staying deeply engaged in building the systems that power our platform. Your impact will span designing high-performance data pipelines, optimizing database and distributed system performance, and ensuring massive streams of system events can be ingested, aggregated, and distilled into meaningful intelligence.

You will collaborate closely with teams across Cisco, including Hypershield and Splunk, to create the integration points that transform raw data into actionable insights for enterprise security. In this role, you’ll solve some of the most complex system-level challenges in observability and infrastructure, helping Tetragon evolve to meet the needs of modern cloud-native environments.

What You’ll Do

• Develop high-quality Go (and eBPF) code for the Tetragon project.
• Design and implement new Tetragon features to enhance its capabilities for Runtime security detection and enforcement
• Design and optimize systems for large-scale Tetragon deployment and operation in K8s or VM platforms
• Architect infrastructure that converts raw event data into intelligence streams with minimal performance overhead.
• Contribute to open-source projects and represent Cisco Isovalent in community discussions.
• Participate in architecture reviews, code reviews, and documentation.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelors + 8 years of related experience, or Masters + 6 years of related experience, or PhD + 3 years of related experience
• 10+ years of experience in systems programming (Go, C, or similar; Tetragon is primarily written in Go).
• Experience in building system software in Go (or similar) and/or eBPF
• Experience in system-level development, Linux kernel development, distributed systems, or run-time security systems

Preferred Qualifications

• Knowledge of eBPF for observability or security use cases.
• Experience in debugging and optimization with a track record of delivering scalable systems.
• Solid background in Linux systems and kernel-level concepts.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes and cloud-native environments.
• Experience integrating with observability platforms (e.g., Splunk) or SaaS security/analytics systems.
• Familiarity with CVE workflows, vulnerability data pipelines, or security event modeling.
• Exposure to real-time streaming/aggregation systems and database performance optimization.
• Contributions to open-source projects in networking, observability, or distributed systems.
• Experience working across diverse, distributed teams

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 t