Lead Machine Learning Engineer , AI Defense; Hybrid

Position: Lead Machine Learning Engineer , AI Defense (Hybrid)
The application window is expected to close on: 11/22/2026

This is a Hybrid role based out of Cisco's San Jose office. Meet the Team Cisco’s AI Defense is dedicated to securing the next generation of enterprise AI platforms, autonomous agents, and foundation models. Our team brings together world-class distributed systems engineers, security researchers, and AI practitioners in an agile, high-velocity, and collaborative environment. You will join as a technical leader shaping both the product architecture and team culture.

This is a rare opportunity to define the industry standard for AI security at Cisco’s global enterprise scale.

Your Impact As a Technical Lead, you will serve as a hands-on technical authority for AI Defense, owning the systems that detect, validate and stop threats to AI. You will drive hard design and implementation challenges, from low-latency LLM inference at scale to secure deployments in customer environments. Your work will set the engineering standards for the team and directly shape how Cisco secures AI for its customers.

Define and drive the architecture of scalable, high-performance platform services that protect AI applications and agents in real time.

Remain hands-on in design and implementation, leading by example on the most complex and ambiguous technical problems.

Shape LLM inference and model-hosting strategy, balancing latency, cost and scale for enterprise workloads.

Partner with Product, Threat Research and Ops to deploy production-grade features and capabilities, delivered with operational excellence.

Act as a technical thought leader and mentor, raising the engineering bar and communicating complex strategy and trade-offs to senior leadership.

Minimum Qualifications Bachelor's in Computer Science and 10+ years or Master's and 8+ years or PHD and 3+ years of software engineering experience, including architecting and delivering large-scale distributed systems.

Experience with cloud-native backend development and modern cloud infrastructure.

Prior experience with technical leadership across teams while remaining hands-on.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience with LLM inference, generative AI systems, or AI/ML infrastructure.

Background in security products or AI security.

Experience delivering SaaS and hybrid enterprise deployments.

Why Cisco? 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. Message to applicants applying to work in the U.S. and/or Canada:

The starting salary range posted for this position is $ to $ and reflects the projected salary range for new hires in this position in U.S. and/or Canada locations, not including incentive compensation*, equity, or benefits.

Individual pay is determined by the candidate's hiring location, market conditions, job-related skillset, experience, qualifications, education, certifications, and/or training. The full salary range for certain locations is listed below. For locations not listed below, the recruiter can share more details about…