Lead ML Engineer — AI Security & Scalable Platforms

Cisco Systems; Milpitas (CA); Hybrid; USD 198,000 - 323,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

401(k) plan with Cisco matching

Paid parental leave

RSUs

Job summary

Cisco is hiring a Hybrid Lead Machine Learning Engineer to act as a hands-on technical leader for AI Defense. In this role, you will own systems that detect, validate, and stop threats to AI, while helping shape LLM inference and model-hosting strategy for enterprise workloads.

Based in Milpitas, CA, this role combines architecture leadership with active coding, mentoring, and cross‑functional collaboration with Threat Research, Product, and Ops to deliver scalable, secure AI platform services.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's in Computer Science or higher with 10+ years of software engineering experience in large-scale distributed systems.
• Experience with cloud-native backend development and modern cloud infrastructure.
• Technical leadership across teams while remaining hands-on.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the architecture of scalable, high-performance platform services that protect AI applications and agents in real time.
• Stay hands-on in design and implementation, leading on the most complex and ambiguous technical problems.
• Shape LLM inference and model-hosting strategy, balancing latency, cost, and scale for enterprise workloads.
• Partner with Product, Threat Research, and Ops to deploy production-grade features and capabilities with operational excellence.
• Serve as a technical thought leader and mentor by raising the engineering bar and communicating complex strategy and trade-offs to senior leadership.

Education

Bachelor's in Computer Science

Master's in Computer Science

PhD in Computer Science

Tools

Cloud infrastructure

Job description

Cisco is hiring a Hybrid Lead Machine Learning Engineer to act as a hands-on technical leader for AI Defense. In this role, you will own systems that detect, validate, and stop threats to AI, while helping shape LLM inference and model-hosting strategy for enterprise workloads.

Based in Milpitas, CA, this role combines architecture leadership with active coding, mentoring, and cross‑functional collaboration with Threat Research, Product, and Ops to deliver scalable, secure AI platform services.