Principal Software Engineer, AI Defense (Hybrid)
About The Position
Cisco’s AI Defense team is a fast-growing engineering group focused on securing enterprise AI platforms, autonomous agents, and foundation models. The team builds security control and data planes for Cisco’s AI-native portfolio, including Cloud Control, AI Canvas, and AI Studio, to defend against prompt injection, agent misuse, and data exfiltration. The Principal Software Engineer will serve as the chief technical authority for end-to-end security architecture across Cisco’s enterprise AI ecosystems. The role combines strategic, cross-organizational leadership with hands-on systems development, translating AI safety research into production-ready software. The engineer will establish resilient, zero-trust security boundaries for enterprise AI, mentor senior engineers, shape engineering standards, and define AI defense systems at Cisco scale. This is a hybrid role based out of Cisco’s San Jose office. The application window is expected to close on November 29, 2026.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science and 15 or more years of relevant software engineering experience, or a master’s degree and 12 or more years, or a Ph.D. and 8 or more years building enterprise-scale distributed systems.
- At least 8 years of hands-on software development using Go, Python, or Java to build production microservices, SDKs, and REST/gRPC APIs.
- Experience architecting and operating multi-tenant cloud-native infrastructure on AWS or GCP, including Kubernetes (EKS/GKE) and event-driven data streaming (Kafka/MSK).
- At least 5 years of core engineering experience in cybersecurity, such as cloud security posture management, identity/access governance, RBAC/ABAC, threat modeling, or security analytics.
- Experience building, debugging, or securing production LLM applications, agentic frameworks, or MCP architectures.
Nice To Haves
- Expertise in AI safety engineering, including prompt-injection defenses, graph-based security models, runtime model observability, and policy-as-code frameworks.
- Experience leading greenfield 0-to-1 platform initiatives and executing zero-downtime migrations for high-throughput enterprise SaaS.
- Experience implementing zero-trust network boundaries, secrets management, service meshes such as Envoy or Istio, and automated CI/CD DevSecOps pipelines.
- Technical mentorship and cross-functional leadership skills, with the ability to build consensus across research, engineering, and executive stakeholders.
- Active contributor to open-source security tools, agent-to-agent communication protocols, or industry AI safety standards.
Responsibilities
- Own the technical vision and system design for AI Defense control planes, data planes, policy engines, and real-time posture assessment services.
- Build and deploy high-throughput Go and Python microservices and APIs that process high-volume telemetry under strict latency and reliability SLAs.
- Design runtime guardrails, Model Context Protocol (MCP) policy enforcement, and automated remediation engines to protect agentic AI and models from prompt injection, jailbreaks, and tool abuse.
- Partner with Product Management, Security Research, and platform engineering teams to establish zero-trust architectures and translate customer security requirements into production-ready software.
- Mentor senior engineers, shape engineering standards, and lead technical strategy across organizations.
Benefits
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance
- 401(k) plan with Cisco matching contribution
- Paid parental leave
- Short- and long-term disability coverage
- Basic life insurance
- Restricted stock unit grants may be available, subject to eligibility and vesting conditions
- Paid holidays and a floating holiday for non-exempt employees
- Paid birthday day off
- Paid year-end holiday shutdown
- Paid personal wellness days
- Vacation time 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 employees
- Performance-based incentive pay for employees on sales plans
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Principal
