Senior Staff Engineer - Agentic Identity

Cisco•San Francisco, CA

4d•$214,100 - $309,800

About The Position

Cisco is hiring a Senior Staff Engineer to define and build foundational identity, authentication, and governance infrastructure for non-human callers and autonomous AI agents. The role addresses identity and access management for agents that search, call APIs, and perform multi-step actions across customer data, across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid architectures. The engineer will lead technical strategy from concept through production, translating identity and access challenges into resilient, enterprise-grade software. The work includes greenfield architectural challenges at enterprise scale and collaboration with security, AI, and platform leaders. The role focuses on building scalable identity and access management capabilities for AI agents, delivering reusable developer tools and APIs, aligning architecture across partner teams, setting technical direction and standards, mentoring engineers, and rapidly prototyping and validating production solutions. Cisco describes its work as connecting and protecting organizations in the AI era, with a collaborative global environment and opportunities to grow. The stated salary range for U.S. and/or Canada locations is $214,100 to $309,800, excluding incentive compensation, equity, and benefits; pay depends on hiring location and other job-related factors. Higher full salary ranges are listed for certain locations. U.S. benefits include medical, dental and vision insurance, a 401(k) plan with matching contribution, paid parental leave, disability coverage, basic life insurance, paid holidays and other time away, and possible restricted stock unit grants. Non-sales employees may be eligible for annual bonuses.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field and 12+ years of software engineering experience, or a master’s degree and 8+ years of relevant experience.
10+ years of experience designing and building distributed systems, backend services, or security platforms in production environments.
5+ years of experience implementing enterprise identity, authentication, or access protocols such as OAuth 2.0/2.1, OIDC, SAML, SCIM, LDAP, SPIFFE, or mTLS.
4+ years of experience with containerization technologies such as Docker, containerd, or Kubernetes, and at least one major cloud platform (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
3+ years of experience with security engineering principles, including threat modeling, attack-path analysis, or security architecture reviews.

Nice To Haves

Experience designing or securing AI-adjacent architectures, tool-using agentic workflows, policy control layers, or MCP authorization.
Deep technical expertise developing multithreaded, high-throughput server-side applications in Go, C/C++, or Java on Linux.
Familiarity with AI-specific security risks, including prompt injection, tool misuse, privilege escalation, and unsafe delegation patterns.
Experience contributing to industry standards bodies such as IETF, OpenID Foundation, or AuthZEN, or presenting at technical industry conferences.
Working knowledge of device trust integrations, endpoint posture assessment, and hardware-backed identity signals for policy enforcement.

Responsibilities

Design and implement scalable identity and access management frameworks for AI agents, including token exchange, credential brokering, workload identity, and delegated access models.
Build reusable APIs, SDKs, CLI tools, and integration patterns—including Model Context Protocol (MCP)-based access—to support adoption across platform and product teams.
Partner with Security, AI Platform, Product, and Cloud Operations teams to align identity architecture with operational constraints and customer workflows.
Set architectural direction, conduct design and code reviews, establish engineering standards for non-human identity, and mentor engineering talent.
Rapidly prototype solutions for ambiguous identity and security problems, validate them with internal and external partners, and iterate them into scalable production services.
Lead technical strategy from initial concept through production deployment.

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 day off for employee’s birthday
Paid year-end holiday shutdown
Paid personal wellness days
Paid vacation or flexible vacation time off, depending on employee classification
Paid sick time
Additional paid time away may be requested for critical or emergency family issues
Optional paid volunteer days
Annual bonuses may be available for non-sales roles
Employees may be eligible for Cisco restricted stock unit grants