Senior ML Platform & AI Orchestration Lead

020 Cisco Systems, Inc.; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 257,000 - 333,000; Full time

Job summary

Cisco Systems, Inc. seeks a Senior Technical Lead to own the architectural direction and cross-service execution for our distributed AI platform.

You will drive end-to-end technical specifications, decompose designs into executable work streams across multiple teams, and harden complex service communications with zero-trust patterns. You will mentor senior engineers, advance security resilience, and guide integration of LLM orchestration, agentic runtimes, and modern API gateways.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in CS/CE/EE or related technical discipline with 12+ years of software engineering experience.
• Master’s degree with 8+ years; or PhD with 5+ years; or equivalent combination of education and verified industry software engineering experience.
• 7+ years designing, building, and operating high-concurrency, distributed backend microservices.
• 4+ years designing and implementing enterprise authentication and authorization systems (e.g., OAuth 2.0 / OIDC, JWT, RFC 8693 token exchange, mTLS).
• AI SDLC experience leveraging code gen tools and agents for software development.
• Experience building or integrating LLM orchestration frameworks, agentic runtimes (ReAct), tool-calling interfaces, or MCP servers.
• Experience deploying and operating services on Kubernetes with automated secret management and distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry/APM).

Responsibilities

• Own architectural direction and cross-service technical execution for our distributed AI platform to ensure robust identity and multi-tenancy.
• Author end-to-end technical specifications for platform capabilities to decompose complex system designs into executable work streams across multiple engineering teams.
• Harden service-to-service communication by deploying cryptographic identity signing and zero-trust verification to enhance fleet security.
• Lead structured CVE remediation and production triage to maintain system stability and security resilience.
• Establish high engineering standards and mentor senior engineers to drive the platform's technical maturity.

Skills

Distributed systems

Go

Python

Security/Identity

AI SDLC

LLM orchestration

Mentoring

Zero-trust security

Education

Bachelor’s degree in CS/CE/EE or related field

Master’s degree

PhD

Tools

Kubernetes

OpenTelemetry

JWT/OAuth2/OIDC

mTLS

Temporal

gRPC

Protobuf

Weaviate

Milvus

Qdrant

Kafka

WebSockets

Job description

Cisco Systems, Inc. seeks a Senior Technical Lead to own the architectural direction and cross-service execution for our distributed AI platform.

You will drive end-to-end technical specifications, decompose designs into executable work streams across multiple teams, and harden complex service communications with zero-trust patterns. You will mentor senior engineers, advance security resilience, and guide integration of LLM orchestration, agentic runtimes, and modern API gateways.