Software Engineering Technical Leader

Cisco•Richardson, RI

About The Position

As a Software Engineering Technical Leader in Cisco’s CX Engineering organization, you will serve as the principal technical authority driving the next generation of enterprise AI and cloud-native platforms. Scaling beyond team-level execution, you will define multi-year roadmaps, bridge complex business goals with high-throughput architectures, and elevate engineering excellence by mentoring technical leaders across the organization.

Requirements

Bachelor’s with 8+ years of related experience or Master’s with 6+ years of related experience.
4+ years’ experience in software development as a Technical Lead or similar lead role across large scale systems.
Python experience building production grade microservices and event driven architectures.
Technical experience in cloud-native ecosystems (such as AWS, GCP, or Azure), container orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker), and automated CI/CD infrastructures.
Experience designing high-concurrency, distributed data pipelines and messaging systems (e.g., Apache Kafka, Redis, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB/Cassandra).
Background in API contract design (gRPC, REST, GraphQL) and systemic domain-driven design (DDD).

Nice To Haves

Demonstrated success in shaping overarching backend product strategies and data architectures, including evaluating and implementing pioneering capabilities (example – AI driven pipelines) to influence multi-year business roadmaps.
Demonstrated history architecting scalable MLOps, LLM integration frameworks, agentic AI platforms, fine-tuning infrastructure, or large-scale hybrid/vector search engine integrations (e.g., Pinecone, Qdrant).
Experience establishing observability platforms (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana), chaos engineering protocols, and formal site reliability engineering (SRE) frameworks.
Active involvement in driving open-source contributions, technology patents, enterprise architecture standards, or speaking at industry conferences.
Demonstrated ability to navigate ambiguity, drive technical consensus, and communicate complex architectural concepts to divers stakeholders.

Responsibilities

Lead the end-to-end design and system topology for multi-tenant cloud platforms, evaluating emerging technologies to drive governance across microservices and hybrid data environments.
Architect foundational AI applications, including distributed Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), agentic workflows, multi-modal LLM orchestrations, and secure vector retrieval systems.
Design fault-tolerant, elastic systems by establishing company-wide standards for concurrency control, high-throughput messaging (Apache Kafka), caching, and multi-region data persistence.
Enforce zero-trust integration patterns and data protection standards (HashiCorp Vault, OAuth2/OIDC) while ensuring compliance with enterprise Service Level Objectives (SLOs).
Conduct global architecture review boards (ARBs) and champion best practices across API contracts (gRPC/REST), Kubernetes orchestration, CI/CD, and observability.
Mentor Lead Software Engineers and drive technical consensus across matrixed pods, aligning disparate technology stacks toward unified enterprise goals.
Partner with product and engineering executives to translate long-term business strategy into actionable execution blueprints.

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)
flexible vacation time off program (exempt)
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 subject to Cisco’s policies (non-sales roles)
performance-based incentive pay on top of their base salary (sales roles)
grants of Cisco restricted stock units