Distinguished Software Engineer, AI Software & Platform Hybrid - Cisco

OpenTalent; Milpitas (CA); On-site; USD 260,000 - 380,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenTalent seeks a Principal AI Systems Architect to define and champion the enterprise-wide technical strategy for agentic systems, including multi-agent orchestration, planning/reflection loops, and durable execution patterns for hyperscale reliability.

You will drive executive trade-offs on model frameworks, infrastructure roadmaps, and capability ceilings, and push for standard interfaces, governance, and security across AI production environments.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or related field; 17+ years total software engineering experience; Master’s 14+ years; PhD 10+ years.

Responsibilities

• Define and champion the enterprise-wide technical strategy for agentic systems, including multi-agent orchestration, planning/reflection loops, and durable execution patterns that operate with hyperscale reliability.
• Negotiate critical build-versus-buy trade-offs at the executive level, influencing corporate-wide investment decisions regarding model frameworks, infrastructure roadmaps, and capability ceilings.
• Drive the adoption of industry-standard interfaces (MCP) across Cisco’s portfolio to enable interoperable AI agents across tools and vendors.
• Establish and enforce rigorous engineering standards and reference architectures for AI; mentor Principal and Senior staff to elevate technical bar.
• Lead the technical resolution of high-risk challenges, prototyping breakthrough methodologies before company-wide commitment.
• Own the security posture of agentic systems, including defenses against prompt injection, scoped tool-permissioning, and sandboxing for autonomous actions.

Skills

Strategic AI architecture

Agent orchestration

Distributed systems design

LLM production systems

Security and containment

Model governance

Inference optimization

AIOps

LangSmith/Arize tooling

LangGraph/SDKs

Cross-organizational leadership

Industry governance (NIST/ISO)

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or related field

Master's degree

PhD

Tools

LangSmith (trial/evaluation)

Arize Phoenix

LangFuse

Braintrust

Job description

• Define and champion the enterprise-wide technical strategy for agentic systems, including multi-agent orchestration, planning/reflection loops, and durable execution patterns that operate with hyperscale reliability.
• Negotiate critical build-versus-buy trade-offs at the executive level, influencing corporate-wide investment decisions regarding model frameworks, infrastructure roadmaps, and capability ceilings.
• Drive the adoption of industry-standard interfaces, such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP), across Cisco’s broad product portfolio to create a seamless, interoperable ecosystem for AI agents that can communicate across tools and across vendors
• Establish and enforce rigorous engineering standards and reference architectures for AI, mentoring Principal and Senior staff to elevate the technical bar across the entire AI organization.
• Personally lead the technical resolution of the most complex, high-risk\"black bo\" challenges, prototyping and proving out breakthrough methodologies before company-wide commitment.
• Own the security posture of agentic systems, including defenses against prompt injection, scoped tool-permissioning, and sandboxing for autonomous actions that carry write access to production systems.
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related field with 17+ years of total software engineering experience; Master's with 14+ years; or PhD with 10+ years.
• 10+ years of specialized experience in designing and scaling distributed systems, hyperscale cloud platforms, or high-throughput data architectures.
• 5+ years in a Principal-level role (or equivalent) demonstrating sustained technical influence across multiple engineering organizations.
• 3+ years of hands-on experience building and operating LLM-based production systems, including managing model lifecycle, evaluation infrastructure (e.g., LangSmith, Arize Phoenix, LangFuse, Braintrust, or equivalent), and security commitments.
• Experience designing and delivering at least one production-grade multi-agent system or agent-orchestration framework (e.g., LangGraph, Temporal, or custom high-scale agent SDKs).
• Expertise in AIOps domains, specifically event correlation, root cause analysis, and closed-loop remediation at scale.
• Expertise in AIOps domains, specifically event correlation, root cause analysis, and closed-loop remediation at scale.
• Deep knowledge of inference optimization techniques, including speculative decoding, KV/prefix caching, and model distillation/routing strategies.
• Recognized thought leadership in the external technical community (e.g., patents, published research in top-tier journals/conferences, or significant open-source contributions).
• Comprehensive understanding of global AI governance frameworks (e.g., NIST AI RMF, EU AI Act, ISO 42001) and experience operationalizing compliance in enterprise software.