Distinguished Engineer - Chief Architect

Meet The Team

The AI Platforms and Enablement team is the engine behind Cisco's internal AI transformation. Our mission is to build and scale CIRCUIT, Cisco's universal enterprise AI platform designed to collapse information silos and amplify productivity through intelligent, agentic experiences.

CIRCUIT is more than a platform—it is the foundation for how Cisco will reimagine work through secure, scalable AI. Our team combines platform development with enterprise enablement, ensuring that business units can adopt AI capabilities, integrate proprietary data, and transform legacy workflows into intelligent, autonomous experiences.

The organization operates through an Eight-Pillar CIRCUIT model spanning Platform Engineering, Solutions Engineering, Process Engineering, Product Management, UX Design, Technical Program Management, Innovation & Advanced Architecture, and Strategy & Operations. Together, these pillars balance specialized execution with multi-functional collaboration to move from invention to production at enterprise scale.

Within this model, Innovation & Advanced Architecture serve as the Invention Lab. This team works on solving Cisco's most complex AI architecture challenges, incubating breakthrough capabilities, and establishing the path from invention to production-ready platform features.

You will define the long-term architecture for Cisco's enterprise AI platform, encompassing agentic systems, multi-agent orchestration, LLM integration, search and AI convergence, retrieval and memory frameworks, evaluation and reliability systems, human-in-the-loop controls, and scalable data pipelines. Your work will ensure the platform remains modular, secure, resilient, interoperable, and future-ready.

You will lead the design and resolution of the organization's most complex technical challenges, including multi-agent system reliability, orchestration frameworks, long-term context retention, model routing, retrieval patterns, trust mechanisms, and enterprise-scale AI performance. You will set architectural principles and reference patterns that reduce fragmentation and enable consistent execution across the eight-pillar operating model.

You will create and drive a clear path that converts advanced technical invention into production-grade platform capabilities. Partnering closely with Platform Engineering, you will ensure new ideas are designed for production from the outset and hardened into operationally ready services. In collaboration with Product Management, you will align technical innovation with CIRCUIT's long-term roadmap and value proposition.

You will act as the primary architectural bridge across Platform Engineering, Solutions Engineering, Process Engineering, Product, and other Cisco business units, driving alignment on standards, frameworks, and reference architectures. You will work across corporate functions to ensure internal AI efforts build on CIRCUIT in a way that is secure, interoperable, and extensible.

You will lead rapid exploration of emerging areas such as agent collaboration, autonomous planning, practive workflows, tool use, long-term memory, and new interaction models, evaluating technical feasibility, scalability, and enterprise readiness. You will stay closely connected to advances in AI research, open-source ecosystems, model providers, cloud platforms, and enterprise AI frameworks, guiding adoption where it creates durable advantage for Cisco.

You will represent Cisco as a recognized technical authority in enterprise AI, engaging with research communities, partners, customers, and industry ecosystems. You will translate complex technical strategy into clear direction for executives, senior engineering leaders, and strategic stakeholders, and support high-level customer and partner conversations by articulating Cisco's AI architecture approach and lessons learned from operating CIRCUIT at scale.

You will elevate the technical maturity of the organization through mentorship, architectural reviews, standards setting, and guidance. You will coach senior engineers and technical leaders, build a strong bench of architectural talent, develop a culture of…