AI Operations Engineer

Cisco•Research Triangle Park, NC

11d•$169,800 - $214,800•Hybrid

About The Position

Join Cisco’s Commerce Operations Engineering Center (COEC) as an AI Engineer, where you will be part of a dynamic team driving innovation through AI-powered automation. Collaborate with multi-functional AI, engineering, and operations teams to transform sophisticated operational challenges into reliable, scalable AI solutions that advance Cisco’s AI-first future. As an AI Engineer in COEC, you will design, build, and operate production-ready AI agents that power Cisco’s Commerce Operations. You will translate complex operational needs into automated workflows by orchestrating LLM reasoning, tool/function calling, retrieval, enterprise integrations, and agent-to-agent communication. You will be responsible for the full lifecycle of AI agent delivery—from solution design, guardrails, and system integration to evaluation, deployment, monitoring, and continuous improvement. Your work will help eliminate manual tasks, improve speed and accuracy, and drive operational excellence.

Requirements

7+ years of experience in software engineering or a related field within an enterprise environment.
Shown experience building and deploying LLM-powered or agentic AI applications in production.
Strong Python skills and tactical experience with LLM/agent frameworks such as LangChain, LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, OpenAI SDK, Anthropic SDK, or equivalents.
Practical expertise in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), prompt engineering, tool/function calling, agent orchestration, and multi-agent communication or workflow orchestration.
Experience with API and system integrations, including REST, GraphQL, event-driven services, authentication, and enterprise data sources.
Demonstrated ability to lead technical delivery and collaborate effectively with multi-functional business and engineering teams.

Nice To Haves

Experience with agent interoperability standards and protocols, including A2A, Model Context Protocol (MCP), and OpenAPI-based tool integration.
Skilled in designing enterprise-grade multi-agent systems, human-in-the-loop workflows, and implementing agent guardrails.
Validated experience with agent evaluation and observability tools such as eval harnesses, tracing, LangSmith, Langfuse, or equivalent AgentOps/LLMOps platforms.
Knowledge of vector databases and sophisticated retrieval methods, including hybrid search, reranking, multimodal retrieval, and knowledge-graph grounding.
Familiarity with AI governance and safety practices, including RBAC, audit logging, PII handling, and controls for high-risk automated actions.
Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and MLOps/LLMOps practices, including cost-aware LLM routing and FinOps.
Understanding of commerce platforms, commerce operations, or supply chain operations.
Consistent record of leading end-to-end AI or agentic AI delivery in sophisticated enterprise environments.
Advanced degree in AI, Machine Learning, Computer Science, or related field preferred.

Responsibilities

Design and build AI agents that automate manual and repetitive Commerce Operations tasks.
Implement agent orchestration using frameworks such as LangGraph, LangChain, AutoGen, CrewAI, or equivalent.
Build agent-to-agent integrations using emerging standards such as A2A and MCP to enable reliable coordination and delegation.
Design secure API integrations with commerce platforms and enterprise data sources using REST, GraphQL, webhooks, event-driven services, authentication, rate limiting, and error handling.
Build and optimize retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines using documents, structured data, and knowledge repositories.
Implement guardrails, human approval gates, LLM routing, and failover mechanisms to ensure reliability, safety, and cost control.
Apply prompt and context engineering to ensure AI agents deliver accurate, safe, and consistent outcomes.
Build evaluation and observability capabilities, including offline test sets, online monitoring, tracing, audit logging, and quality regression detection.
Own deployment and production operations, including CI/CD, progressive rollout, rollback, monitoring, model/version control, and cost tracking.
Supervise AI solution performance and report business impact through critical metrics such as efficiency gains, cycle-time reduction, incident reduction, and operational accuracy.
Continuously improve AI workflows, tools, and methodologies to increase reliability, scalability, and business value.
Partner with Commerce Operations, application development, infrastructure, and business teams to integrate AI solutions into existing systems and workflows.

Benefits

medical, dental and vision insurance
a 401(k) plan with a Cisco matching contribution
paid parental leave
short and long-term disability coverage
basic life insurance
10 paid holidays per full calendar year, plus 1 floating holiday for non-exempt employees
1 paid day off for employee’s birthday, paid year-end holiday shutdown, and 4 paid days off for personal wellness determined by Cisco
16 days of paid vacation time per full calendar year, accrued at rate of 4.92 hours per pay period for full-time employees (non-exempt)
flexible vacation time off program (exempt)
80 hours of sick time off provided on hire date and each January 1st thereafter, and up to 80 hours of unused sick time carried forward from one calendar year to the next
Additional paid time away may be requested to deal with critical or emergency issues for family members
Optional 10 paid days per full calendar year to volunteer
annual bonuses (for non-sales roles)
performance-based incentive pay (for sales roles)