Staff Software Engineer - AI/Security Platform

Cisco•San Francisco, CA

3d•$186,900 - $267,700

About The Position

Cisco is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to help build AI-native security operations capabilities. The role involves designing systems that combine security-relevant data, detection signals, context, and foundation models to identify and predict active and emerging threats. The engineer will prototype and test AI features with security subject-matter experts and researchers, develop an AI DevOps pipeline for rapid data experimentation, and architect a distributed platform that correlates large volumes of events and signals into explainable findings and alerts for triage and resolution agents. The role also collaborates with product and platform teams to develop scalable AI-enhanced threat detection and prediction workflows, and contributes to the architecture behind trusted, enterprise-scale security automation. The team is agile, action-oriented, and focused on solving real-world cybersecurity problems. It brings together expertise in AI, cybersecurity, platform engineering, and systems engineering, and values builders who are comfortable with ambiguity and motivated to advance cyber defense.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree and 8+ years of related experience, or a master's degree and 6+ years of related experience.
Experience with storage systems and storage access layers.
Experience implementing data platforms and/or data lakes and warehouses.
Experience building scalable backend services, APIs, and automation workflows in Python.
Experience designing agent systems that perform coding tasks.
Experience with common telemetry data sources, such as endpoint logs, network traffic, authentication events, or cloud audit trails, and understanding their use in detection and investigation workflows.

Nice To Haves

Experience building and maintaining pipelines for ingesting, parsing, and normalizing large-scale security telemetry.
Understanding of security operations, including attack surface management, threat analytics, detection, triage, investigation, and response; alternatively, experience as a Tier 3 SOC analyst or equivalent, automating SecOps workflows and building scalable, resilient detection infrastructure.
Hands-on experience developing retrieval-augmented generation pipelines and working with databases such as FAISS or Pinecone.
Skill in crafting, testing, and optimizing training workloads for large language or special-purpose models such as GNNs, GCNs, and GATs.
Experience contributing to or shipping an AI-powered feature or product, including understanding usability, performance, and trust considerations when integrating models into real-world workflows.
Ability to design experiments that evaluate model output for accuracy, usability, performance, and cost.

Responsibilities

Design and build systems combining security-relevant data, detection signals, context, and foundation models to identify and predict threats.
Prototype and test AI features for decoding events and system environments and predicting anomalies and threats, in collaboration with security SMEs and researchers.
Develop an AI DevOps pipeline for rapid experimentation with data, knowledge bases, models, and context memory, using measurable success criteria.
Architect and build a distributed platform to correlate large volumes of events and signals and produce explainable findings and alerts for triage resolution agents.
Collaborate with product and platform teams to co-design scalable, useful AI-enhanced threat detection and prediction workflows.
Contribute to the core architecture for AI-native security operations and trusted enterprise automation.

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
Potential Cisco restricted stock unit grants, subject to eligibility and continued employment vesting conditions
10 paid holidays per full calendar year
One floating holiday for non-exempt employees
Paid birthday day off
Paid year-end holiday shutdown
Four paid personal wellness days
Paid vacation time for non-exempt employees; exempt employees participate in a flexible vacation program with no defined limit, subject to availability and business limitations
80 hours of sick time off on hire and each January 1, with up to 80 unused hours carried forward
Additional paid time away may be requested for critical or emergency family issues
Optional 10 paid volunteer days per full calendar year
Annual bonuses may be available for non-sales roles, subject to Cisco policies
Sales incentive compensation for employees on sales plans, subject to applicable Cisco plans