Machine Learning Engineering Technical Leader

The AI Software & Platform Team designs and operates the core platform infrastructure that connects Cisco’s enterprise product dashboards with intelligent, agentic AI capabilities. By building a multi-service architecture of agentic orchestrators and high-throughput API gateways, the team ensures that AI capabilities are integrated seamlessly into the larger Cisco ecosystem to drive real-time operational workflows  team is composed of highly technical engineers working with Go and Python microservices, fostering a vibe of high-scale innovation and security resilience.

It is an exciting time to join the team as we define the future of agentic AI orchestration and distributed system trust within the enterprise.

As a Senior Technical Lead
, you will own the architectural direction and cross-service technical execution for our distributed AI platform to ensure robust identity and multi-tenancy. You will author end-to-end technical specifications for platform capabilities to decompose complex system designs into executable work streams across multiple engineering teams. You will harden service-to-service communication by deploying cryptographic identity signing and zero-trust verification to enhance fleet security.

Additionally, you will lead structured CVE remediation and production triage to maintain system stability and security resilience. Success in this role means establishing high engineering standards and mentoring senior engineers to drive the platform's technical maturity.

• Education & Experience
  :
  Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or related technical discipline + 12+ years of professional software engineering experience; OR Master’s degree with 8+ years; OR PhD with 5+ years; OR an equivalent combination of education and verified industry software engineering experience.
• Distributed Systems Engineering
  :
  Minimum of 7 years designing, building, and operating high-concurrency, distributed backend microservices in production, with experience in both Go and Python
  .
• Identity & Security
  :
  Minimum of 4 years designing and implementing enterprise authentication and authorization systems (e.g.,
  OAuth 2.0 / OIDC, JWT, RFC 8693 token exchange, mTLS
  ).
• AI Software Development Lifecycle (AI-SDLC): Experience leveraging code gen tools and agents for software development.
• AI & Agentic Systems
  :
  Experience building or integrating LLM orchestration frameworks
  , agentic runtimes (e.g., ReAct), tool-calling interfaces, or Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers.
• Cloud Infrastructure
  :
  Experience deploying and operating services on Kubernetes with automated secret management and distributed tracing (
  Open Telemetry/APM
  ).

• Experience designing API gateways
  , gRPC/protobuf service definitions, and shared client libraries across large monorepos.
• Experience with distributed workflow engines (e.g.,
  Temporal
  ) and real-time event streaming (SSE, Web Sockets, Kafka).
• Experience with feature flag lifecycle management and targeting using tools like Launch Darkly
  .
• Experience leading remediation programs in collaboration with internal offensive security or red-team penetration testing groups.
• Experience integrating vector databases (e.g., Weaviate, Milvus, Qdrant) and relational databases (
  PostgreSQL/pgx
  ) at scale.

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…