Technical Lead, AI-Native Software Engineering; hybrid

The application window is expected to close on: 10/29/2026

Technical Lead, AI-Native Software Engineering (hybrid) - 2025652

• hybrid role, some onsite activity required

The Security Workflow Engineering team, as part of the Security & Trust Organization, is responsible for engineering and delivering tools that help discover, mitigate, and report on security engineering across every application, platform, and service that Cisco delivers to its customers. It is our responsibility to provide an end-to-end digital experience with automation to help engineering across Cisco.

At our core, we are a team of engineers, with a focus on AI assisted security tooling, committed to helping develop tools that strive to seamlessly integrate and support building security into the development workflow.

We're looking for a Technical Lead to set the technical direction across our team's full body of work. It's a role for someone whose depth of software engineering experience makes them the person the team turns to when an architectural decision actually matters.

You'll be front and center on the technology-heavy problems: the ones that need a strong, well-reasoned opinion, not just a functioning solution. You'll guide engineers on how to make sound technical and architectural choices, by bringing hard-won judgment that your reasoning holds up under scrutiny. You'll also work across team boundaries with other technical leaders, reasoning through shared problems and driving decisions that drive forward progress.

This work moves fast, and you bring a real sense of urgency to it — treating technical debt and open decisions as things to resolve now, not eventually.

• Set technical direction across the team's portfolio of work and be the person engineers escalate to when a decision genuinely needs deep expertise.
• Take the lead on the hardest technical problems — the ones that call for a strongly reasoned, optimized, and defensible architecture.
• Guide software engineers on making sound technical and architectural choices, sharing the judgment that comes from having made — and learned from — those choices many times before.
• Collaborate with technical leaders on other teams to reason through cross-cutting problems and drive shared decisions forward, with urgency.
• Stay hands‑on enough to be credible: reviewing designs and code where it matters, not managing from a distance.

• Software engineering is a passion for you, not just a skill you picked up — it shows in the depth and care behind your technical opinions.
• You have vast, hands‑on software engineering experience, and it shows in how quickly you can spot the right architecture for a problem versus one that will cause pain down the line.
• You form strong, well‑reasoned technical opinions and can defend them logically, while staying genuinely open to adapting to novel ideas for solving challenges.
• You're comfortable being the person accountable for technical decisions, not just contributing an opinion among many.
• You can guide and influence other engineers' technical judgment without formal authority over them.
• You work well with other technical leaders who don't report to you, building enough credibility and trust that decisions get made rather than stalled.
• You operate with a sense of urgency — you know the difference between a decision that deserves careful deliberation and one that's just sitting there costing the team time.

• BS or MS degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field, or demonstrated equivalent experience.
• Extensive, hands‑on software engineering experience, with a track record of making architectural decisions for systems that mattered and held up.
• Deep expertise in…