Generative AI Security Engineer

Cisco Systems, Inc.; North Carolina; On-site; USD 129,000 - 185,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental & vision insurance

Cisco 401(k) with matching

Paid parental leave

Disability & life insurance

Paid holidays & time off

Job summary

Cisco Systems, Inc. is seeking an Enterprise AI security engineer to design and implement security controls for Generative AI systems, including LLM-based applications and RAG pipelines. You will mitigate AI-specific threats and define guardrails for prompt handling and secure tool invocation.

You will collaborate across security, platform, and product teams to protect model deployment, access controls, and runtime monitoring throughout the AI lifecycle.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Cybersecurity related field or equivalent certifications along with work experience.
• 3+ years of experience in application security, cloud security, or platform security engineering.
• Hands-on experience securing distributed systems or cloud-native applications (Kubernetes, APIs, microservices).
• Experience designing and implementing authentication, authorization, and data protection controls.
• Strong programming/scripting skills (Python, Go, or similar) for building security tooling and automation.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement security controls for Generative AI systems, including LLM-based applications, RAG pipelines, and agent-driven workflows.
• Identify and mitigate AI-specific threats such as prompt injection, data exfiltration, insecure tool usage, and model abuse.
• Establish guardrails for prompt handling, input/output validation, and safe tool invocation to ensure secure agent behavior.
• Secure Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines by enforcing data access controls, source integrity, and retrieval boundary protections.
• Define and enforce model access controls, API protections, and runtime monitoring to prevent misuse and unauthorized access.
• Partner with AI platform and infrastructure teams to integrate security into model deployment pipelines and inference services.
• Conduct threat modeling and security assessments for AI systems, including model lifecycle, data pipelines, and inference endpoints.
• Build automated detection and response mechanisms for AI-specific risks, including anomalous queries and unsafe outputs.

Skills

Security engineering

Kubernetes

APIs

Python/Go

Threat modeling

Security tooling

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s in CS or Cybersecurity

Tools

Kubernetes

APIs

Job description

Cisco Systems, Inc. is seeking an Enterprise AI security engineer to design and implement security controls for Generative AI systems, including LLM-based applications and RAG pipelines. You will mitigate AI-specific threats and define guardrails for prompt handling and secure tool invocation.

You will collaborate across security, platform, and product teams to protect model deployment, access controls, and runtime monitoring throughout the AI lifecycle.