Senior Staff Software Engineer - AI/Security Platform

Cisco•San Jose, CA

About The Position

The application window is expected to close on: 09/17/2026. Job posting may be removed earlier if the position is filled or if a sufficient number of applications are received. Meet the Team: We are an agile team with a startup feel and a strong bias for action. We move fast, embrace failure as part of the process, and stay focused on solving real-world problems for defenders on the front lines. Our team blends deep expertise in AI, cybersecurity, platform and systems engineering. We are driven by a shared belief that the only way to outpace hackers is through AI advancements that free up humans to tackle real threats and more challenging problems. This is a place for builders who thrive in ambiguity, challenge the status quo, and care deeply about making a meaningful impact. If you’re energized by tough problems, excited to shape the future of cyber defense, and eager to work alongside passionate experts, you’ll feel right at home.

Requirements

Bachelor's Degree with 12+ years of related experience or Master's with 8+ years of related experience.
Security Operations Experience – Understanding of security operations concepts, including attack surface management, threat analytics, detection, triage, investigation, and response.
Security Telemetry Fluency – Comfortable working with common data sources such as endpoint logs, network traffic, authentication events, or cloud audit trails—and understanding how they’re used in detection and investigation workflows.
Data Platform/Fabric Familiarity – Experience implementing data platforms and/or data lakes and warehouses.
Security Data Engineering – Experience building and maintaining pipelines for ingesting, parsing, and normalizing large-scale security telemetry.
Distributed Systems design and implementation expertise – with an emphasis on storage systems and storage access layers.
Senior-Level Python Development – Consistent record building scalable backend services, APIs, and automation workflows in Python.
DevOps/SecOps Practices – Proficient with CI/CD pipelines, version control (GitHub/GitLab), Jira, and automated testing frameworks.
Agentic development – Experience designing agent systems that will perform coding tasks for you.
Cross-Functional Collaboration – Experience partnering with product managers, security SMEs, and engineers to iterate quickly and deliver impactful solutions.

Nice To Haves

Enterprise-grade Security Product Experience – Familiarity with TDIR/SIEM architectures, correlation searches, threat hunting support systems. Bonus if you’ve worked with Splunk’s APIs, internals, or have experience developing on the Splunk platform.
Security Operations Background – Former Tier 3 SOC analyst or equivalent, with experience automating SecOps workflows and building scalable, resilient detection infrastructure.
Data Encoding & Embeddings – Exposure to event storage systems or generating custom embeddings for domain-specific tasks in cybersecurity.
RAG and GraphRAG Search Implementation – Hands-on experience developing retrieval-augmented generation pipelines and working with databases (e.g., FAISS, Pinecone).
Model Integration – Skilled in crafting, testing, and optimizing training workloads for large language or special-purpose models such as GNNs, GCNs, GATs. Ideally, you have contributed to or shipped an AI-powered feature or product, and understand the nuances of integrating models into real-world workflows - including usability, performance, and trust considerations.
AI Evaluation & Experimentation – Capable of designing experiments to evaluate model output for accuracy, usability, performance, and cost.
UX and Human Factors for Analysts – Background or interest in designing intuitive, AI-assisted analyst workflows with a focus on usability, trust, and decision support.

Responsibilities

Design and build systems that combine security-relevant data, detection signals, context, and foundation models to spot and predict threats, those in action and those that are about to happen.
Prototype and test new AI features - from decoding events and system environments to predicting anomalies and threats - working closely with security SMEs and security researchers to validate real-world utility.
Develop an AIDevOps pipeline to enable rapid experimentation with data, knowledge bases, models, and context memory, using clear, measurable success criteria to evaluate iterations.
Architect and build the distributed platform that can correlate trillions of events & signals, and can synthesize them into explainable findings and alerts, consumed by our triage resolution agents – you will be building a key capability of the Agentic SOC.
Collaborate with product and platform teams to co-design AI-enhanced threat detection and prediction workflows that are intuitive, scalable, and immediately useful to analysts.
Contribute to the core architecture powering AI-native security operations, helping to shape how Splunk and Cisco scale trusted automation across the enterprise.

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
10 paid holidays per full calendar year, plus 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 determined by Cisco
16 days of paid vacation time per full calendar year, accrued at rate of 4.92 hours per pay period for full-time employees (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)
grants of Cisco restricted stock units