Principal AI Defense Architect — Enterprise Security

Cisco Systems, Inc; Milpitas (CA); Hybrid; USD 251,000 - 363,000; Full time

Job summary

Cisco Systems, Inc. in San Jose is seeking a Principal Software Engineer for AI Defense to architect end‑to‑end security for enterprise AI ecosystems. You will balance strategic influence with hands‑on development to deliver production‑ready software that enables zero‑trust boundaries and safe autonomous AI agents.

You will mentor senior engineers, shape engineering standards, and collaborate across teams to secure AI foundations, models, and toolchains in a fast‑moving enterprise environment.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science and 15+ years of relevant software engineering experience, Master’s degree and 12+ years, or Ph.D. and 8+ years building enterprise‑scale distributed systems.
• 8+ years of hands‑on software development experience utilizing Go, Python, or Java to build production microservices, SDKs, and REST/gRPC APIs.
• Experience architecting and operating multi‑tenant cloud‑native infrastructure on AWS or GCP, including container orchestration with Kubernetes (EKS/GKE) and event‑driven data streaming (Kafka/MSK).
• 5+ years of core engineering experience in cybersecurity domains (e.g., cloud security posture management, identity/access governance, RBAC/ABAC, threat modeling, or security analytics).
• Experience building, debugging, or securing LLM applications, agentic frameworks, or Model Context Protocol (MCP) architectures in production.

Responsibilities

• Architect enterprise AI defense platforms by owning the technical vision and system design for AI Defense control planes, data planes, policy engines, and real‑time posture assessment services to safeguard enterprise AI workflows against adversarial attacks.
• Write and deploy high throughput microservices and APIs in Go and Python to process high‑volume telemetry streams under strict latency and reliability SLAs.
• Harden agentic AI and model security through design runtime guardrails, MCP policy enforcement, and automated remediation engines to neutralize prompt injection, model jailbreaks, and tool‑abuse risks.
• Drive cross‑organizational technical strategy by partnering with Product Management, Security Research, and platform engineering teams across Cisco to establish zero‑trust architectures and convert complex customer security requirements into production‑ready software.

Skills

Go

Python

Java

Distributed systems

Kubernetes

Security

LLM apps

Cloud security

Education

Bachelor's degree

Master's degree

Ph.D.

Tools

Kafka/MSK

Kubernetes (EKS/GKE)

Job description

Cisco Systems, Inc. in San Jose is seeking a Principal Software Engineer for AI Defense to architect end‑to‑end security for enterprise AI ecosystems. You will balance strategic influence with hands‑on development to deliver production‑ready software that enables zero‑trust boundaries and safe autonomous AI agents.

You will mentor senior engineers, shape engineering standards, and collaborate across teams to secure AI foundations, models, and toolchains in a fast‑moving enterprise environment.