Principal Engineer - AI Defense

Applications are accepted until further notice

Meet the Team

The Cisco’s AI team consists of AI researchers, and software developers who collaborate to build innovative products and platforms for Cisco. We are motivated by tackling unique challenges that arise when connecting people and devices at a world-wide scale.

You will join the AI Defense team as one of the core members and have the opportunity to influence the culture and direction of the growing team. Our team includes AI experts and distributed system experts who work together with our partners in products management, and engineers across a wide variety of other Cisco teams.

You will be working with a passionate, supportive, personal growth-oriented team by your side. We can’t wait to see where your imagination will take you!

Your Impact

We are seeking a Principal Engineer to lead the architecture and development of our AI Security Posture Management (SPM) product. You’ll partner with product management, security researchers, data/ML teams, and platform engineers across Cisco to define the end-to-end technical vision, drive architectural decisions, and ship secure, scalable services that our customers trust.

• Architect and Build: Design, implement, and own a secure, scalable, multi-tenant cloud-native AI SPM platform, driving development, data architecture, and system hardening.
• Drive Reliability and Operational Excellence: Ensure platform reliability, performance, and operational quality through best practices in resiliency, observability, and incident response.
• Mentor and Collaborate: Mentor engineering teams, set high technical standards, and collaborate across Cisco to integrate with key platforms and drive business alignment.

Minimum Qualifications

• Leadership & Architecture: 15+ years designing large-scale, distributed cloud platforms, with emphasis on secure, event-driven, high-throughput systems.
• Technical Expertise: Proficient in Go, Python, AWS (EKS, EC2, IAM, etc.), and cloud-native development with microservices, APIs, and real-time pipelines.
• Security Focus: Built and hardened security features, implemented zero-trust, and architected multi-account AWS solutions.
• Data & Analytics: Designed data architectures for high-volume telemetry and analytics using both streaming and batch patterns.
• Operational Excellence: Drove reliability, autoscaling, observability, and incident response in SaaS environments.
• Mentorship & Collaboration: Mentored engineers, led reviews, and collaborated across teams to drive integration and compliance.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with agentic AI and model security (guardrails, model evaluation/observability, prompt/tool abuse prevention, policy enforcement for MCP/A2A).
• Familiarity with policy-as-code (OPA/Rego), graph-based security models, and risk scoring frameworks.
• Prior experience leading platform migrations or greenfield 0→1 initiatives at scale.
• Experience with observability stacks, performance tuning, and SRE practices
• Knowledge of Kubernetes (EKS), service meshes, API gateways, and Envoy-based architectures.

Why Cisco?

#WeAreCisco. We are all unique, but collectively we bring our talents to work as a team, to develop innovative technology and power a more inclusive, digital future for everyone. How do we do it? Well, for starters – with people like you!

Nearly every internet connection around the world touches Cisco. We’re the Internet’s optimists. Our technology makes sure the data traveling at light speed across connections does so securely, yet it’s not what we make but what we make happen which marks us out. We’re helping those who work in the health service to connect with patients and each other; schools, colleges, and universities to teach in even the most challenging of times. We’re helping businesses of all shapes and sizes to connect with their employees and customers in new ways, providing people with access to the digital skills they need and connecting the most remote parts of the world – whether through 5G, or otherwise.

We tackle whatever challenges come our way. We have each other’s backs, we recognize our accomplishments, and we grow together. We celebrate and support one another – from big and small things in life to big career moments. And giving back is in our DNA (we get 10 days off each year to do just that).

We know that powering an inclusive future starts with us. Because without diversity and a dedication to equality, there is no moving forward. Our 30 Inclusive Communities, that bring people together around commonalities or passions, are leading the way. Together we’re committed to learning, listening, caring for our communities, whilst supporting the most vulnerable with a collective effort to make this world a better place either with technology, or through our actions.

So, you have colorful hair? Don’t care. Tattoos? Show off your ink. Like polka dots? That’s cool. Pop culture geek? Many of us are. Passion for technology and world changing? Be you, with us! #WeAreCisco

#CiscoAIJobs