Principal AI Defense Engineer — Enterprise Security

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

Job summary

Cisco Systems, Inc. is seeking a Principal Software Engineer for AI Defense to lead the end-to-end security architecture of Cisco's enterprise AI ecosystems.

You will design high-throughput control planes, data planes, and policy engines to defend against adversarial AI threats, while balancing strategic collaboration with hands-on development. You will mentor engineers, shape engineering standards, and drive zero-trust security across Cisco's AI platforms, including MCP tooling and agentic

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science and 15+ years of relevant software engineering experience.
• 8+ years of hands-on software development building production microservices, SDKs, and REST/gRPC APIs.
• Experience architecting multi-tenant cloud-native infrastructure on AWS or GCP with Kubernetes and event streams.
• 5+ years in cybersecurity domains (cloud security posture, IAM, RBAC/ABAC, threat modeling).
• Experience building, debugging, or securing LLM apps, agentic frameworks, or MCP architectures.
• Expertise in AI safety engineering, prompt-injection defenses, and policy-as-code frameworks.

Responsibilities

• Architect enterprise AI defense platforms and secure control/data planes to protect AI workflows.
• Write and deploy high-throughput microservices and APIs in Go and Python with low latency.
• Harden AI systems with MCP policy enforcement and automated remediation against prompt injections.
• Drive cross-team strategy to implement zero-trust architectures and secure software production.

Skills

Go

Python

Java

Kubernetes

Kafka

Security research

AI safety

Education

Bachelor's degree in computer science

Master's degree

Ph.D.

Tools

Kubernetes (EKS/GKE)

Kafka/MSK

REST API / gRPC

Cloud platforms (AWS/GCP)

Job description

Cisco Systems, Inc. is seeking a Principal Software Engineer for AI Defense to lead the end-to-end security architecture of Cisco's enterprise AI ecosystems.

You will design high-throughput control planes, data planes, and policy engines to defend against adversarial AI threats, while balancing strategic collaboration with hands-on development. You will mentor engineers, shape engineering standards, and drive zero-trust security across Cisco's AI platforms, including MCP tooling and agentic