Principal Machine Learning Engineer

Cisco • Milpitas, MI

1d

About The Position

Cisco’s AI Software & Platform Team builds enterprise AI platform software to enhance security resilience, threat defense, and operational automation across Cisco’s portfolio. The team develops core platform infrastructure, agentic frameworks, and AI-enabled product interfaces connecting enterprise product dashboards with intelligent AI capabilities.

As a Principal Software Engineer on the AI Platform Engineering team, you will serve as a lead technical architect and technical authority. You will define architectural vision, lead system design, and direct technical execution for the Agentic Ops Solution (AI Canvas) and related AI platform capabilities. You will establish technical standards, evaluate emerging technologies, and collaborate with product management and engineering teams to deliver scalable AI systems.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field plus 12+ years of software engineering experience; or a master’s degree plus 10+ years; or a PhD plus 7+ years; or an equivalent combination of education and verified industry experience.
• At least 8 years of experience designing and deploying distributed cloud software platforms, microservices, or enterprise-scale automation systems.
• At least 4 years in a technical leadership capacity, such as Principal Engineer, Lead Architect, or Technical Lead, driving architectural decisions across multidisciplinary engineering teams.
• Experience leveraging code-generation tools in software development to achieve significant productivity improvements.
• Demonstrated experience building and deploying production applications using generative AI, LLM orchestration frameworks, or AI assistants/copilots.
• Hands-on backend or full-stack software development experience using modern languages such as Python, Go, or TypeScript/Node.js and cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes, Docker, and cloud hyperscaler platforms.
• AI-first mindset, sound technical judgment, and ability to decompose vague, complex problems into actionable deliverables.
• Proficiency in spec-driven and schema-driven development, including code generation, strongly typed API contracts, and implementation traceability.
• Understanding of architecture and operational constraints for both SaaS and on-premise deployment models.
• Clear technical writing and ability to lead design reviews.

Nice To Haves

• Experience architecting multi-agent systems, agentic workflow runtimes, or graph-based execution engines such as LangGraph or MCP.
• Experience with harness engineering and loop engineering.
• Experience developing enterprise developer platforms, SDKs, APIs, and modern front-end user interfaces such as React and TypeScript.
• Experience with model-serving infrastructure, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architectures, and LLM evaluation or benchmarking frameworks.
• Authored technical patents, peer-reviewed publications, or significant open-source contributions in distributed systems, software platforms, or applied AI.

Responsibilities

• Define architectural vision and lead system design for the Agentic Ops Solution (AI Canvas) and associated AI platform capabilities.
• Direct technical execution for AI platform initiatives and establish technical standards.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and collaborate with product management and engineering teams to deliver scalable AI systems.
• Build shared infrastructure, abstractions, and paved roads that improve productivity across engineering teams.
• Mentor team members and drive technical decisions across cross-functional and cross-organizational boundaries.
• Build LLM and agentic systems, including orchestrators, ReAct-style and deep agents, tool calling, MCP servers, streaming and asynchronous task results, and conversational disambiguation.
• Run services on Kubernetes, including deployment configuration, secret management, and health checks, while working closely with SRE.
• Debug across service boundaries using logs, traces, and metrics.
• Write clear technical documentation and lead design reviews with engineering, QA, product, and security teams.

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
• Paid personal wellness days
• Flexible vacation time off program for eligible exempt employees
• Paid vacation time for non-exempt employees
• 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: Principal