Meet the Team
Cisco’s AI team consists of AI researchers, and software developers who collaborate to build innovative products and platforms for Cisco. We are motivated by tackling unique challenges that arise when connecting people and devices at a worldwide scale.
You will join the AI Defense team as one of the core members and have the opportunity to influence the culture and direction of the growing team. Our team includes AI experts and distributed system experts who work together with our partners in products management, and engineers across a wide variety of other Cisco teams.
You will be working with a passionate, supportive, and personal growth-oriented team by your side. We can’t wait to see where your imagination will take you!
Your Impact
We are seeking a Principal Engineer to lead the architecture and development of our AI Security Posture Management (AI SPM) product. You’ll partner with product management, security researchers, data/ML teams, and platform engineers across Cisco to define the end-to-end technical vision, drive architectural decisions, and ship secure, scalable services that our customers trust.

• Architect and Build: Design, implement, and own a secure, scalable, multi-tenant cloud-native AI SPM platform, driving development, data architecture, and system hardening.
• Drive Reliability and Operational Excellence: Ensure platform reliability, performance, and operational quality through best practices in resiliency, observability, and incident response.
• Mentor and Collaborate: Mentor engineering teams, set high technical standards, and collaborate across Cisco to integrate with key platforms and drive business alignment.

Minimum Qualifications

• Leadership & Architecture: 15+ years designing large-scale, distributed cloud platforms, with emphasis on secure, event-driven, high-throughput systems.
• Technical Expertise: Proficient in Go, Python, AWS (EKS, EC2, IAM, etc.), and cloud-native development with microservices, APIs, and real-time pipelines.
• Security Focus: Built and hardened security features, implemented zero-trust, and architected multi-account AWS solutions.
• Data & Analytics: Designed data architectures for high-volume telemetry and analytics using both streaming and batch patterns.
• Operational Excellence: Drove reliability, autoscaling, observability, and incident response in SaaS environments.
• Mentorship & Collaboration: Mentored engineers, led reviews, and collaborated across teams to drive integration and compliance.

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior experience leading platform migrations or greenfield 0→1 initiatives at scale.
• Experience with observability stacks, performance tuning, and SRE practices
• Knowledge of Kubernetes (EKS), service meshes, API gateways, and Envoy-based architectures.

At Cisco, we’re revolutionizing how data and infrastructure connect and protect organizations in the AI era – and beyond. We’ve been innovating fearlessly for 40 years to create solutions that power how humans and technology work together across the physical and digital worlds. These solutions provide customers with unparalleled security, visibility, and insights across the entire digital footprint.

Fueled by the depth and breadth of our technology, we experiment and create meaningful solutions. Add to that our worldwide network of doers and experts, and you’ll see that the opportunities to grow and build are limitless. We work as a team, collaborating with empathy to make really big things happen on a global scale. Because our solutions are everywhere, our impact is everywhere. 

We are Cisco, and our power starts with you.