Machine Learning Engineering Technical Leader

Cisco • San Jose, CA

9d

About The Position

The AI Software & Platform Team designs and operates core platform infrastructure connecting Cisco enterprise product dashboards with intelligent, agentic AI capabilities. The team builds a multi-service architecture of agentic orchestrators and high-throughput API gateways to integrate AI capabilities with the broader Cisco ecosystem and support real-time operational workflows at scale. Its engineers work with Go and Python microservices, with a focus on innovation and security resilience.

As a Senior Technical Lead, you will own the architectural direction and cross-service technical execution for a distributed AI platform, ensuring robust identity and multi-tenancy. You will create end-to-end technical specifications and break complex system designs into executable work streams across engineering teams. You will strengthen service-to-service communication through cryptographic identity signing and zero-trust verification, and lead structured CVE remediation and production triage. You will establish engineering standards and mentor senior engineers to advance the platform’s technical maturity.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical discipline and 12+ years of professional software engineering experience; or a master’s degree and 10+ years; or a Ph.D. and 7+ 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 for software development.
• Demonstrated experience building or integrating LLM orchestration frameworks, agentic runtimes such as ReAct, tool-calling interfaces, or Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers.
• Hands-on experience deploying and operating services on Kubernetes with automated secret management and distributed tracing using 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 technologies such as SSE, WebSockets, or Kafka.
• Experience with feature flag lifecycle management and targeting using tools such as LaunchDarkly.
• Experience leading remediation programs 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, ensuring robust identity and multi-tenancy.
• Author end-to-end technical specifications for platform capabilities.
• Decompose complex system designs into executable work streams across multiple engineering teams.
• Harden service-to-service communication by deploying cryptographic identity signing and zero-trust verification.
• Lead structured CVE remediation and production triage to maintain system stability and security resilience.
• Establish high engineering standards and mentor senior engineers.

Benefits

• Medical insurance
• Dental insurance
• Vision insurance
• 401(k) plan with Cisco matching contribution
• Paid parental leave
• Short- and long-term disability coverage
• Basic life insurance
• Paid holidays
• Floating holiday for non-exempt employees
• Paid birthday day off
• Paid year-end holiday shutdown
• Personal wellness days
• Paid vacation or flexible vacation time off, depending on employee classification
• Sick time off
• Additional paid time away may be requested for critical or emergency family issues
• Optional paid volunteer days
• Annual bonuses for eligible non-sales roles
• Potential Cisco restricted stock unit grants

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior