Senior Software Engineer

Cisco Systems, Inc.; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 168,000 - 245,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k) matching

Health benefits

Paid time off

Job summary

Cisco Systems, Inc. is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join the AI Platform team.

You will contribute to architecture, design, development, and operation of an enterprise-scale agent platform, working hands-on across the platform including harness, SDK, AI infrastructure, memory systems, and user interfaces. You will collaborate with architects, product managers, security, and domain teams to deliver scalable backend platforms, with emphasis on performance, observability, and secure,

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or a related field required.
• Experience shipping LLM-powered applications or agents to production.
• Experience with Python and designing frameworks, SDKs, or platform APIs.
• Familiarity with distributed systems fundamentals: API design, asynchronous/event-driven processing, streaming, caching, rate limiting, fault tolerance.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to the design and delivery of the platform from design through production operation.
• Write code, review designs and pull requests, and tackle hard technical problems.
• Build reusable platform capabilities with clear interfaces, versioning, and documentation.
• Uphold engineering standards for quality, security, observability, and evaluation.
• Improve latency, reliability, and cost for production AI workloads.
• Run what you build: define SLOs, participate in on-call, and incident reviews.
• Collaborate with architects, product managers, security, and domain teams to translate requirements into solutions.
• Mentor peers through code reviews, design discussions, and documentation.

Skills

LLM-powered apps

Python

Distributed systems

API design

Education

Bachelor's degree in computer science or related field

Master's degree in related field

Tools

LangGraph/LangChain

FastAPI

Kafka

PostgreSQL/pgvector

OpenTelemetry

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

Meet the Team

We're building an enterprise platform for AI agents - the shared foundation that lets engineering teams build, deploy, and run agents that are secure, reliable, and cost-effective at scale. Agents built on the platform serve customers, partners, and internal teams across many products and channels. As a Senior Software Engineer, you'll help build the platform end to end, collaborate closely with a team of engineers, and stay deep in the code.

Your Impact

As a Senior Software Engineer on the AI Platform, you will play a crucial role in advancing how the organization builds and operates AI agents - by contributing to the architecture, design, development, and operation of a modern, enterprise-scale agent platform. You'll work hands-on across every part of the platform: the agent harness and SDK that engineers use to build and run agents; the AI infrastructure and governance that provide secure, policy-controlled access to models, tools, and data; context and memory systems that get agents the right information at the right time; evaluation and observability that measure agent quality, cost, and behavior; the AI user experiences that bring agents into applications and partner integrations; and applied agents built in production alongside domain teams.

• Contribute to the design and delivery of the platform, from first design through production operation.
• Write code, review designs and pull requests, and take on hard technical problems.
• Build reusable platform capabilities that other teams can depend on, with clear interfaces, versioning, and documentation.
• Uphold engineering standards for quality, security, observability, and evaluation.
• Improve latency, reliability, and cost for production AI workloads.
• Run what you build: help define SLOs, take part in on-call, and participate in incident reviews.
• Work with technologies like Python, LangGraph/LangChain, FastAPI, MCP, Kafka, PostgreSQL/pgvector, OpenTelemetry, Docker, and Kubernete
• Partner with architects, product managers, security, and domain teams to translate business requirements into technical solutions.
• Share knowledge and mentor peers through code reviews, design discussions, and documentation.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree +7 or a Masters +4 years of experience in building and running production backend or distributed systems. Degree is expected to be in computer science or a related field
• Experience shipping LLM-powered applications or agents to production, and handling failure.
• Experience with Python, and experience designing frameworks, SDKs, or platform APIs that other engineers build on.
• Experience with distributed systems fundamentals: API design, asynchronous and event-driven processing, streaming, caching, rate limiting, and fault tolerance.

Preferred Qualifications

• Clear written communication: including design docs that explain trade-offs to both engineers and leadership
• Agent development: tool/function calling, multi-step and multi-agent orchestration, durable execution, and human-in-the-loop approvals, using LangGraph/LangChain or comparable frameworks.
• Agent interoperability: exposing agents and tools through open protocols such as MCP, A2A, and A2UI.
• Context engineering: RAG, vector and hybrid search, and memory - with PostgreSQL/pgvector, OpenSearch/Elasticsearch/Qdrant, Redis, and embedding/reranking models.
• Models and LLM infrastructure: major providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, Bedrock, Azure OpenAI); vLLM; gateways such as LiteLLM; plus routing, token/cost management, caching, and latency optimization
• Backend and APIs: FastAPI, asyncio, and Pydantic; REST, gRPC, SSE, and WebSockets; event streaming with Kafka. SQL and Java are a plus.
• Evaluation and observability: eval datasets, rubrics, and LLM-as-judge; OpenTelemetry (incl. GenAI conventions), LangSmith, Ragas/DeepEval, Prometheus, and Grafana.
• AI safety and governance: guardrails, prompt-injection defense, PII detection/redaction, and sandboxed execution (NeMo Guardrails, Llama Guard, Presidio, gVisor, or Firecracker).
• Security: OAuth 2.0/OIDC/JWT; workload identity (e.g., SPIFFE/SPIRE); tenant isolation and audit logging; policy as code with Open Policy Agent or Cedar; secrets management such as Vault.
• Cloud-native infrastructure: Docker, Kubernetes, and Helm; Terraform; a major cloud (AWS, Azure, or GCP); CI/CD such as GitHub Actions or Jenkins.
• AI user experiences: React with streaming chat/agent interfaces and generative UI toolkits such as the Vercel AI SDK, A2UI, or MCP-UI.
• Bonus: building an internal platform/SDK adopted by multiple teams; running AI systems for enterprise customers; open-source contributions to agent frameworks or protocols.

Why Cisco?

At Cisco, we're revolutionizing how data and infrastructure connect and protect organizations in the AI era - and beyond. We've been innovating fearlessly for 40 years to create solutions that power how humans and technology work together across the physical and digital worlds. These solutions provide customers with unparalleled security, visibility, and insights across the entire digital footprint.

Fueled by the depth and breadth of our technology, we experiment and create meaningful solutions. Add to that our worldwide network of doers and experts, and you'll see that the opportunities to grow and build are limitless. We work as a team, collaborating with empathy to make really big things happen on a global scale. Because our solutions are everywhere, our impact is everywhere.

We are Cisco, and our power starts with you.

Message to applicants applying to work in the U.S. and/or Canada:

The starting salary range posted for this position is $167,700.00 to $245,200.00 and reflects the projected salary range for new hires in this position in U.S. and/or Canada locations, not including incentive compensation*, equity, or benefits.

Individual pay is determined by the candidate's hiring location, market conditions, job-related skillset, experience, qualifications, education, certifications, and/or training. The full salary range for certain locations is listed below. For locations not listed below, the recruiter can share more details about compensation for the role in your location during the hiring process.

U.S. employees are offered benefits, subject to Cisco's plan eligibility rules, which include medical, dental and vision insurance, a 401(k) plan with a Cisco matching contribution, paid parental leave, short and long-term disability coverage, and basic life insurance. Please see the Cisco careers site to discover more benefits and perks. Employees may be eligible to receive grants of Cisco restricted stock units, which vest following continued employment with Cisco for defined periods of time.

U.S. employees are eligible for paid time away as described below, subject to Cisco's policies:

• 10 paid holidays per full calendar year, plus 1 floating holiday for non-exempt employees
• 1 paid day off for employee's birthday, paid year-end holiday shutdown, and 4 paid days off for personal wellness determined by Cisco
• Non-exempt employees** receive 16 days of paid vacation time per full calendar year, accrued at rate of 4.92 hours per pay period for full-time employees
• Exempt employees participate in Cisco's flexible vacation time off program, which has no defined limit on how much vacation time eligible employees may use (subject to availability and some business limitations)
• 80 hours of sick time off provided on hire date and each January 1st thereafter, and up to 80 hours ofunused sick timecarried forwardfrom one calendar yearto the next
• Additional paid time away may be requested to deal with critical or emergency issues for family members
• Optional 10 paid days per full calendar year to volunteer

For non-sales roles, employees are also eligible to earn annual bonuses subject to Cisco's policies.

Employees on sales plans earn performance-based incentive pay on top of their base salary, which is split between quota and non-quota components, subject to the applicable Cisco plan. For quota-based incentive pay, Cisco typically pays as follows:

• .75% of incentive target for each 1% of revenue attainment up to 50% of quota;
• 1.5% of incentive target for each 1% attainment between 50% and 75%;
• 1% of incentive target for each 1% of attainment between 75% and 100%; and
• Once performance exceeds 100% attainment, incentive rates are at or above 1% for each 1% of attainment with no cap on incentive compensation.

For non-quota-based sales performance elements such as strategic sales objectives, Cisco may pay 0% up to 125% of target. Cisco sales plans do not have a minimum threshold of performance for sales incentive compensation to be paid.

The applicable full salary ranges for this position, by specific state, are listed below:

New York City Metro Area:

$167,700.00 - $282,000.00

Non-Metro New York state & Washington state:

$149,100.00 - $250,900.00

* For quota-based sales roles on Cisco's sales plan, the ranges provided in this posting include base pay and sales target incentive compensation combined.

** Employees in Illinois, whether exempt or non-exempt, will participate in a unique time off program to meet local requirements.