Senior Software QA Engineer (AI Software/Platform Team), Hybrid, Milpitas, CA
About The Position
The AI Software & Platform team delivers AI products and platform for all Cisco Secure products and portfolios so businesses around the world can defend against threats and safeguard the most vital aspects of their business with security resilience. Our passion lies in making our customers secure by simplifying security with zero compromise! Lead the quality strategy for large-scale Generative AI products and platforms, defining how we validate AI services, distributed systems, and end-to-end customer experiences. Design scalable testing and automation approaches across AI pipelines, APIs, user interfaces, federated microservices, and multi-tenant SaaS architectures to improve product quality and release confidence. Establish release-readiness practices using measurable quality gates, test traceability, production-representative environments, and data-driven Go/No-Go criteria. Analyze model degradation, system failures, and test instability to drive root-cause analysis and improve the reliability and resilience of our AI platform. Partner with Engineering, Product, UX, DevOps, Documentation, and Customer Engineering while mentoring QA engineers and advancing quality-first engineering practices across teams.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s Degree, Engineering, or a related field, combined with 6 years of relevant experience, or Master's Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, combined with 4 years of experience or PhD, combined with 2 years of practical experience.
- Experienced designing and implementing test strategies, automation frameworks, and test infrastructure for distributed software systems, cloud platforms, or SaaS products.
- Python development experience and experience with automated testing frameworks such as Pytest, Playwright, Selenium, or equivalent.
- Experience validating frontend and backend systems, including REST and/or GraphQL APIs, service integrations, CI/CD pipelines, and distributed microservice architectures.
- Experience defining release-quality criteria and diagnosing system failures using test results, logs, metrics, and other engineering data.
Nice To Haves
- Experience testing Generative AI, AI/ML platforms, AI agents, LLM-powered applications, or other AI-based products, including evaluation of model quality and degradation.
- Experience designing AI-agent-assisted QA workflows using tools such as Cursor, Claude, Codex CLI, or equivalent, including agent-based or MCP-based test orchestration.
- Experience testing multi-tenant cloud platforms and managing complex AI test environments involving datasets, model versions, feature flags, Kubernetes, and deployment technologies such as ArgoCD.
- Experience building scalable test frameworks and establishing practices across multiple engineering teams, including mentoring QA or software engineers.
- Knowledge of security, privacy, data governance, or compliance requirements relevant to enterprise SaaS and AI products.
Responsibilities
- Lead the quality strategy for large-scale Generative AI products and platforms, defining how we validate AI services, distributed systems, and end-to-end customer experiences.
- Design scalable testing and automation approaches across AI pipelines, APIs, user interfaces, federated microservices, and multi-tenant SaaS architectures to improve product quality and release confidence.
- Establish release-readiness practices using measurable quality gates, test traceability, production-representative environments, and data-driven Go/No-Go criteria.
- Analyze model degradation, system failures, and test instability to drive root-cause analysis and improve the reliability and resilience of our AI platform.
- Partner with Engineering, Product, UX, DevOps, Documentation, and Customer Engineering while mentoring QA engineers and advancing quality-first engineering practices across teams.
Benefits
- medical, dental and vision insurance
- a 401(k) plan with a Cisco matching contribution
- paid parental leave
- short and long-term disability coverage
- basic life insurance
- grants of Cisco restricted stock units
- 10 paid holidays per full calendar year
- 1 floating holiday for non-exempt employees
- 1 paid day off for employee’s birthday
- paid year-end holiday shutdown
- 4 paid days off for personal wellness
- 16 days of paid vacation time per full calendar year (non-exempt employees)
- flexible vacation time off program (exempt employees)
- 80 hours of sick time off provided on hire date and each January 1st thereafter
- up to 80 hours of unused sick time carried forward from one calendar year to the next
- Additional paid time away may be requested to deal with critical or emergency issues for family members
- Optional 10 paid days per full calendar year to volunteer
- annual bonuses (for non-sales roles)
- performance-based incentive pay (for sales roles)
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
