Principal Engineer - AI Defense
Cisco
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
When available, the salary range posted for this position reflects the projected hiring range for new hire, full-time salaries in U.S. and/or Canada locations, not including equity or benefits. For non-sales roles the hiring ranges reflect base salary only; employees are also eligible to receive annual bonuses. Hiring ranges for sales positions include base and incentive compensation target. Individual pay is determined by the candidate's hiring location and additional factors, including but not limited to skillset, experience, and relevant education, certifications, or training. Applicants may not be eligible for the full salary range based on their U.S. or Canada hiring location. The recruiter can share more details about compensation for the role in your location during the hiring process.
U.S. employees have access to quality medical, dental and vision insurance, a 401(k) plan with a Cisco matching contribution, short and long-term disability coverage, basic life insurance and numerous wellbeing offerings.
Employees receive up to twelve paid holidays per calendar year, which includes one floating holiday (for non-exempt employees), plus a day off for their birthday. Non-Exempt new hires accrue up to 16 days of vacation time off each year, at a rate of 4.92 hours per pay period. Exempt new hires participate in Cisco’s flexible Vacation Time Off policy, which does not place a defined limit on how much vacation time eligible employees may use, but is subject to availability and some business limitations. All new hires are eligible for Sick Time Off subject to Cisco’s Sick Time Off Policy and will have eighty (80) hours of sick time off provided on their hire date and on January 1st of each year thereafter. Up to 80 hours of unused sick time will be carried forward from one calendar year to the next such that the maximum number of sick time hours an employee may have available is 160 hours. Employees in Illinois have a unique time off program designed specifically with local requirements in mind. All employees also have access to paid time away to deal with critical or emergency issues. We offer additional paid time to volunteer and give back to the community.
Employees on sales plans earn performance-based incentive pay on top of their base salary, which is split between quota and non-quota components. For quota-based incentive pay, Cisco typically pays as follows:
.75% of incentive target for each 1% of revenue attainment up to 50% of quota;
1.5% of incentive target for each 1% of attainment between 50% and 75%;
1% of incentive target for each 1% of attainment between 75% and 100%; and once performance exceeds 100% attainment, incentive rates are at or above 1% for each 1% of attainment with no cap on incentive compensation.
For non-quota-based sales performance elements such as strategic sales objectives, Cisco may pay up to 125% of target. Cisco sales plans do not have a minimum threshold of performance for sales incentive compensation to be paid.