Machine Learning Engineering Technical Leader
About The Position
As a Senior Technical Lead on Cisco’s AI Software & Platform Team, you will own architectural direction and cross-service technical execution for a distributed AI platform, with a focus on robust identity and multi-tenancy. You will write end-to-end technical specifications, break complex system designs into executable work streams across engineering teams, and improve service-to-service security through cryptographic identity signing and zero-trust verification. You will also lead structured CVE remediation and production triage to maintain system stability and security resilience, establish high engineering standards, and mentor senior engineers. The AI Software & Platform Team builds and operates core platform infrastructure connecting Cisco enterprise product dashboards with intelligent, agentic AI capabilities. The platform uses agentic orchestrators and high-throughput API gateways to integrate AI into the wider Cisco ecosystem and support real-time operational workflows at scale. The team works with Go and Python microservices and focuses on innovation and security resilience.
Requirements
- A bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical discipline and 12 or more years of professional software engineering experience; or a master’s degree and 10 or more years; or a PhD and 7 or more years; or an equivalent combination of education and verified industry software engineering experience.
- At least 8 years designing, building, and operating high-concurrency distributed backend microservices in production.
- Demonstrable proficiency in both Go and Python.
- At least 4 years designing and implementing enterprise authentication and authorization systems, such as OAuth 2.0/OIDC, JWT, RFC 8693 token exchange, or mTLS.
- Experience leveraging code-generation tools and agents in the software development lifecycle.
- Demonstrated experience building or integrating LLM orchestration frameworks, agentic runtimes such as ReAct, tool-calling interfaces, or Model Context Protocol servers.
- Hands-on experience deploying and operating services on Kubernetes with automated secret management and distributed tracing such as OpenTelemetry/APM.
Nice To Haves
- Experience designing API gateways, gRPC/protobuf service definitions, and shared client libraries across large monorepos.
- Experience with distributed workflow engines such as Temporal and real-time event streaming such as SSE, WebSockets, or Kafka.
- Experience with feature-flag lifecycle management and targeting using tools such as LaunchDarkly.
- Experience leading remediation programs in collaboration with internal offensive security or red-team penetration testing groups.
- Experience integrating vector databases such as Weaviate, Milvus, or Qdrant and relational databases such as PostgreSQL/pgx at scale.
Responsibilities
- Own architectural direction and cross-service technical execution for the distributed AI platform.
- Ensure robust identity and multi-tenancy across the platform.
- Author end-to-end technical specifications for platform capabilities.
- Decompose complex system designs into executable work streams across multiple engineering teams.
- Deploy cryptographic identity signing and zero-trust verification to harden service-to-service communication.
- Lead structured CVE remediation and production triage.
- Establish high engineering standards and mentor senior engineers.
Benefits
- Medical insurance
- Dental insurance
- Vision insurance
- 401(k) plan with a Cisco matching contribution
- Paid parental leave
- Short- and long-term disability coverage
- Basic life insurance
- Paid holidays and a floating holiday for non-exempt employees
- Paid birthday leave, year-end holiday shutdown, and personal wellness days
- Paid vacation time for non-exempt employees
- Flexible vacation time off program for eligible exempt employees
- Paid sick time
- Additional paid time away may be requested for critical or emergency issues for family members
- Optional paid volunteer days
- Annual bonuses for eligible non-sales roles
- Potential grants of Cisco restricted stock units, subject to eligibility and vesting conditions
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
