Software Engineer NextGen AI Search
About The Position
The AI Platforms and Enablement team builds and scales CIRCUIT, Cisco’s enterprise AI platform. This Technical Leader role sits at the intersection of Data Engineering, Search Science, and Generative AI, leading engineers who develop infrastructure that enables internal tools to understand enterprise data and support agentic experiences. The role leads the technical integrity of search pipelines, reliability of LLM integrations, and scalability of agentic workflows. It involves building high-scale data ingestion and search systems, improving retrieval relevance, developing production AI agents, and operating AI capabilities on GCP and Kubernetes. The position also serves as the primary technical contact for stakeholders, evaluates and integrates models, and promotes AI-assisted engineering and modern CI/CD practices.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree plus 7 years of related experience, or master’s degree plus 4 years, or PhD plus 1 year, or equivalent related work experience.
- 7+ years of software engineering experience, including at least 2 years in a lead or high-level individual contributor role.
- 3+ years of hands-on experience designing and operating Elasticsearch in production.
- Proven experience in high-scale data engineering, search infrastructure, and building robust ingestion pipelines using Dataflow (Apache Beam).
- Demonstrated ability to lead technical projects from inception through production deployment, including experience with GCP and Kubernetes.
Nice To Haves
- Expertise designing and implementing hybrid search architectures combining semantic (vector-based) and keyword (BM25) results.
- Experience building RAG systems, including prompt engineering, chaining, and optimizing LLM outputs.
- Extensive experience building and consuming REST APIs and integrating third-party services.
- Experience setting up MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers and exploring ways to connect LLMs to private data.
- Familiarity with AI-assisted development tools such as Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and Claude.
- Ability to define quantitative success metrics for search results.
Responsibilities
- Lead a team of engineers building core infrastructure for internal AI tools and agentic experiences.
- Design and implement high-scale data ingestion pipelines using Dataflow (Apache Beam) and Elasticsearch.
- Ensure internal data is indexed, searchable, and ready for LLM consumption.
- Own the search core, implement advanced re-ranking algorithms, and refine relevancy metrics.
- Design and oversee AI agents with multi-step reasoning, tool-calling, and stable production state management.
- Manage deployments on Kubernetes (GCP), ensure high availability, and implement monitoring and observability.
- Act as the primary technical point of contact for stakeholders.
- Evaluate and integrate models.
- Champion AI-assisted engineering and modern CI/CD practices.
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
- 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
- Potential Cisco restricted stock unit grants
Stand Out From the Crowd
Upload your resume and get instant feedback on how well it matches this job.
What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
