AI Security Engineer
About The Position
Join Cisco’s Enterprise AI team, the core group enabling Generative AI powered experiences across Cisco. Our mission is to build secure, scalable AI platforms that empower teams to safely develop, deploy, and operationalize AI-powered solutions. We operate at the intersection of applied AI, cloud infrastructure and security —partnering across engineering, security, compliance, and product teams to bring trusted AI to life at enterprise scale. We are a fast-growing, highly collaborative team of platform engineers, AI engineers, and data scientists who value technical depth, ownership, and pragmatic execution. What makes this team exciting is the opportunity to define how secure Generative AI is built and governed inside a global technology leader.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Cybersecurity related field or equivalent certifications along with work experience.
- 3+ years of experience in application security, cloud security, or platform security engineering.
- Hands-on experience securing distributed systems or cloud-native applications (Kubernetes, APIs, microservices).
- Experience designing and implementing authentication, authorization, and data protection controls.
- Strong programming/scripting skills (Python, Go, or similar) for building security tooling and automation.
Nice To Haves
- Cybersecurity background and operational experience
- Certifications from ISC2 (e.g CISSP, CCSP) or ISACA (e.g., SSCP, CC, CISA, CISM)
Responsibilities
- Design and implement security controls for Generative AI systems, including LLM-based applications, RAG pipelines, and agent-driven workflows.
- Identify and mitigate AI-specific threats such as prompt injection, data exfiltration, insecure tool usage, and model abuse.
- Establish guardrails for prompt handling, input/output validation, and safe tool invocation to ensure secure agent behavior.
- Secure Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines by enforcing data access controls, source integrity, and retrieval boundary protections.
- Define and enforce model access controls, API protections, and runtime monitoring to prevent misuse and unauthorized access.
- Partner with AI platform and infrastructure teams to integrate security into model deployment pipelines and inference services.
- Conduct threat modeling and security assessments for AI systems, including model lifecycle, data pipelines, and inference endpoints.
- Build automated detection and response mechanisms for AI-specific risks, including anomalous queries and unsafe outputs.
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
- paid time away
- 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
- optional 10 paid days per full calendar year to volunteer
- annual bonuses (for non-sales roles)
- performance-based incentive pay (for sales roles)
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Mid Level
