Principal AI Defense Engineer — Enterprise AI Security

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

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work

Job summary

Cisco Systems, Inc. is seeking a Principal Software Engineer for AI Defense to drive end‑to‑end security architecture for enterprise AI ecosystems.

You will design high‑throughput control and data planes that secure foundation models, multi‑agent frameworks, and MCP tooling, while balancing hands‑on development with mentoring and policy enforcement. You will lead the creation of zero‑trust architectures, guardrails, and remediation engines to prevent prompt injections and model jailbreaks,

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or related field with significant distributed systems experience.
• 8+ years hands-on development building production microservices in Go, Python, or Java.
• Experience architecting multi-tenant cloud-native infrastructure on AWS or GCP and Kubernetes.
• 5+ years in cybersecurity domains (cloud security posture management, IAM, RBAC/ABAC, threat modeling).
• Experience with LLM applications, agent frameworks, or MCP architectures.

Responsibilities

• Architect security-controlled AI defense data and control planes with zero-trust boundaries.
• Lead cross‑functional efforts with product management, security research, and platform engineering.
• Write and deploy high‑throughput microservices and APIs in Go and Python.
• Mentor senior engineers and help define engineering standards across Cisco's AI defense stack.

Skills

Go/Python/Java

Cloud security

LLM security

System architecture

Mentorship

Education

Bachelor’s degree in computer science

Master’s degree +12+ years

Ph.D. +8+ years

Tools

Kubernetes (EKS/GKE)

Kafka/MSK

AWS/GCP

Job description

Cisco Systems, Inc. is seeking a Principal Software Engineer for AI Defense to drive end‑to‑end security architecture for enterprise AI ecosystems.

You will design high‑throughput control and data planes that secure foundation models, multi‑agent frameworks, and MCP tooling, while balancing hands‑on development with mentoring and policy enforcement. You will lead the creation of zero‑trust architectures, guardrails, and remediation engines to prevent prompt injections and model jailbreaks,