Software Engineering Technical Leader

Software Engineering Technical Leader

Cisco's Customer Experience (CX) engineering organization is a global team of experts dedicated to delivering world-class digital experiences by building advanced AI applications and capabilities through an industry leading platform centric approach with Cisco IQ. These capabilities provide high value directly to our customers and partners and empower our internal teams to deliver superior, data-driven services. We pride ourselves on a culture that thrives on customer-centricity and technical rigor, solving complex challenges leveraging AI/ML solutions.

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.

• Strategic Architectural Vision:
  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.
• Enterprise AI & Autonomous Systems:
  Architect foundational AI applications, including distributed Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), agentic workflows, multi-modal LLM orchestrations, and secure vector retrieval systems.
• High-Scale Distributed 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.
• Security, Compliance & Resilience:
  Enforce zero-trust integration patterns and data protection standards (Hashi Corp Vault, OAuth2/OIDC) while ensuring compliance with enterprise Service Level Objectives (SLOs).
• Technical Governance & Engineering Standards:
  Conduct global architecture review boards (ARBs) and champion best practices across API contracts (gRPC/REST), Kubernetes orchestration, CI/CD, and observability.
• Leadership & Organizational Influence:
  Mentor Lead Software Engineers and drive technical consensus across matrixed pods, aligning disparate technology stacks toward unified enterprise goals.
• Executive Alignment:
  Partner with product and engineering executives to translate long-term business strategy into actionable execution blueprints.

Minimum Qualifications:

• 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).

Preferred Qualifications:

• Strategic Product Vision:
  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.
• AI/ML Platform Architecture:
  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).
• Operational Excellence:
  Experience establishing observability platforms (Open Telemetry, Prometheus, Grafana), chaos engineering protocols, and formal site reliability engineering (SRE) frameworks.
• Industry & Strategic Influence:
  Active involvement in driving open-source contributions, technology patents, enterprise architecture standards, or speaking at industry conferences.
• Soft Skills:
  
  Demonstrated ability to navigate ambiguity, drive technical consensus, and…