Rooted in Cisco ‘Design Thinking Principles’, you will place simplification and User Experience (UX) at the core, championing secure coding practices, user privacy, and software engineering excellence. Partnering across product management, UX design, and multi-functional engineering teams, you will author architectural specifications and technical documentation, resolve critical production bottlenecks, drive product innovation, and continuously optimize software delivery pipelines.
Responsibilities
Architectural Vision & Complex Problem Solving: Apply specialized technical mastery to solve intricate architectural problems, interpret internal and external business issues, and define industry-leading standard methodologies.
Cross-Team Leadership & Project Governance: Lead multi-team engineering initiatives from inception through completion, leading workload, technical dependencies, and workstreams holistically.
Technical Roadmap & Strategy: Shape, influence, and drive the multi-year software engineering roadmap, aligning technical architecture with core business and customer outcomes.
High-Impact Feature & Framework Delivery: Lead the end-to-end design, implementation, and delivery of major architectural frameworks, critical platform subsystems, and high-impact features.
Gold-Standard Code Craftsmanship: Author clean, robust, and highly optimized code and automated test suites that set the gold standard for engineering excellence across the organization.
Scalability, Security & Reliability by Design: Champion architectural principles centered on steadfast security, substantial scalability, token throughput, and high-availability runtime reliability.
Threat Modeling & Security Architecture: Drive product threat modeling, identify vulnerability attack surfaces, and enforce zero-trust privacy and compliance standards across platform components.
Observability & Proactive Risk Resolution: Proactively identify, prioritize, and eliminate systemic risks; design robust observability tooling to monitor telemetry, act on real-time alerts, and optimize runtime performance.
Production Operations & SRE Governance: Serve as the ultimate technical escalation point for critical production outages, lead blameless postmortems, review RCAs, and govern robust on-call rotations.
Multi-Component Domain Authority: Serve as a recognized authority on multiple functional components, subsystems, and developer APIs across the broader AI ecosystem.
Product Sense, Market Awareness & Metrics: Articulate complex design trade-offs, integrate market and competitive dynamics into technical choices, and track product adoption and performance metrics.
Scoping & Stakeholder Negotiation: Provide accurate project scoping, establish reliable landmark estimations, and negotiate technical trade-offs with multi-functional stakeholders.
SDLC & Agile Excellence: Advance agile engineering practices, elevate SDLC standards, and establish modern engineering workflows across teams and partner organizations.
Mentorship & Engineering Culture: Mentor and sponsor senior engineers, tech leads, and peers; develop continuous knowledge sharing through architecture brownbag sessions, technical blogs, and external publications.
Minimum Qualifications
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or related STEM field + 8 years of related experience; OR Master’s degree + 6 years of related experience; OR Ph.D. + 3 years of related experience.
In-depth conceptual and practical expertise in software engineering, distributed systems, and platform architecture, with a confirmed history of mastering and applying a wide spectrum of modern technologies.
Mastery of hands-on software development in core languages (e.g., Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, Go, C++, or Rust) with demonstrated success in designing and shipping enterprise-scale, critically important systems.
Consistent track record of serving as a technical lead or systems architect for multi-functional engineering teams, authoring technical design RFCs, and establishing engineering standard methodologies across the SDLC.
Extensive experience in system profiling, distributed debugging, automated testing strategy, and leading high-severity production root cause analysis (RCA).
Preferred Qualifications
Advanced expertise in Generative AI architectures, Agentic AI systems, Model Context Protocol (MCP), LangGraph, LlamaIndex, vLLM, and multi-agent coordination frameworks.
Deep experience architecting high-throughput, low-latency microservices, event streaming platforms (Kafka), asynchronous state machines, and distributed caching (Redis).
Proven knowledge of GPU computing infrastructure, CUDA optimization, Triton Inference Server, high-density server architectures, and container orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker).
Expertise in enterprise identity, security, and access protocols including OAuth 2.0 / RFC 8693 Token Exchange, Zero Trust architecture, and automated threat modeling.
Demonstrated experience designing enterprise observability frameworks (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk) with automated canary and self-healing deployment pipelines.
Active technical contributions to open-source software, published whitepapers, patents in AI/systems engineering, or prominent tech talks at world-class industry conferences.
Outstanding executive communication, negotiation, and partner management skills, capable of influencing senior engineering leadership and product direction.
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 the physical and digital worlds. These solutions provide customers with unparalleled security, visibility, and insights across the entire digital footprint.
Fueled by the depth and breadth of our technology, we experiment and create meaningful solutions. Add to that our worldwide network of doers and experts, and you’ll see that the opportunities to grow and build are limitless. We work as a team, collaborating with empathy to make really big things happen on a global scale. Because our solutions are everywhere, our impact is everywhere.
We are Cisco, and our power starts with you.
Disclaimer
To ensure that we hire the best talent in the right way, we follow a strict hiring process and recently, Cisco has been made aware of fraudulent recruiters claiming to be from the company. Please be advised that any communication from Cisco about careers will:
be in direct response to an application you have submitted through the company career site
begin with screening or an interview
originate from a Cisco email address, and
be conducted across email, phone, or WebEx
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