Senior Software Engineer

Cisco•San Jose, CA

6d•$167,700 - $245,200

About The Position

Join an agile, action-oriented team combining expertise in AI, cybersecurity, platform engineering, and systems engineering to build capabilities that help defenders address real-world threats. The role focuses on applying AI to cyber defense and shaping AI-native security operations. Design and build systems that combine security data, detection signals, contextual information, and foundation models to identify and predict threats. Prototype AI features, develop an AIDevOps pipeline for rapid data experimentation, and architect a distributed platform that correlates large volumes of events and signals into explainable findings and alerts for triage-resolution agents. Collaborate with security specialists, researchers, product teams, and platform teams to create scalable, useful threat-detection workflows and help Cisco and Splunk scale trusted enterprise automation.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree and 7+ years of related experience, or master's degree and 4+ years of related experience.
Experience with storage systems and storage access layers.
Experience working with data platforms, data lakes or warehouses, or streaming platforms.
Experience building scalable backend services, APIs, and automation workflows in Python or Go.
Experience designing agent systems that perform coding tasks.

Nice To Haves

Experience building and maintaining pipelines to ingest, parse, and normalize large-scale security telemetry.
Understanding of security operations, including attack surface management, threat analytics, detection, triage, investigation, and response; alternatively, experience as a Tier 3 SOC analyst or equivalent, including automating SecOps workflows and building scalable, resilient detection infrastructure.
Hands-on experience developing retrieval-augmented generation pipelines and working with vector databases such as FAISS, Pinecone, or Weaviate.
Experience crafting, testing, and optimizing training workloads for large language or special-purpose models such as GNNs, GCNs, or GATs.
Experience contributing to or shipping an AI-powered feature or product and understanding usability, performance, and trust considerations when integrating models into real-world workflows.
Ability to design experiments evaluating model output for accuracy, usability, performance, and cost.

Responsibilities

Design and build systems combining security-relevant data, detection signals, context, and foundation models to identify and predict threats.
Prototype and test AI features, working with security subject-matter experts and security researchers to validate their real-world utility.
Develop an AIDevOps pipeline that enables rapid experimentation with data, knowledge bases, models, and context memory, using measurable success criteria.
Architect and build a distributed platform that correlates events and signals and synthesizes explainable findings and alerts for triage-resolution agents.
Collaborate with product and platform teams to co-design scalable AI-enhanced threat-detection and prediction workflows for analysts.
Contribute to the core architecture for AI-native security operations and help shape trusted enterprise automation.

Benefits

Medical, dental, and vision insurance, subject to plan eligibility rules.
401(k) plan with 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 or flexible vacation time off, depending on employee classification.
Sick time off, with unused sick time carryover subject to the stated limits.
Additional paid time away may be requested for critical or emergency family issues.
Optional paid volunteer days.
Annual bonuses for eligible non-sales employees, subject to Cisco policies.
Eligible employees may receive Cisco restricted stock unit grants.