Senior Staff AI Security Engineer – Agentic SOC

Cisco Systems, Inc; San Jose (CA); Hybrid; USD 214,000 - 310,000; Full time

Job summary

Cisco Systems, Inc is seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer on Cisco’s Security Core AI team to build shared platforms, orchestration, and evaluation systems enabling trusted AI agents across Cisco and Splunk security products.

Your work will define how agentic security operates across public cloud, on-premises, sovereign cloud, and air-gapped environments, where reliability, control, auditability, and customer trust are non-negotiable.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience developing, testing, and/or operating production software.
• Experience building and/or operating large-scale distributed or AI-enabled production systems, with experience programming with Python or Go.
• Bachelor's + 10 years of related experience, or Masters + 6 years of related experience, or PhD + 3 years of related experience.

Responsibilities

• Shape technical direction and lead cross-team Agentic SOC capabilities from concept through production improvement.
• Design and build reusable capabilities spanning agent runtime, orchestration, governed tool use, context and memory, evaluation systems, trace analysis, and quality gates.
• Translate SOC, SIEM, detection, incident, investigation, and response needs into shared mechanisms in partnership with security-domain experts.
• Design agents and supporting systems for grounded reasoning, planning, delegation, human oversight, traceability, auditability, and safe failure handling.
• Establish closed-loop, metrics-driven development using golden datasets, offline and online evaluations, production traces, SME and customer feedback, experiments, and regression gates.

Skills

Python

Go

Distributed systems

Education

Bachelor's degree

Master's degree

PhD

Job description

Cisco Systems, Inc is seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer on Cisco’s Security Core AI team to build shared platforms, orchestration, and evaluation systems enabling trusted AI agents across Cisco and Splunk security products.

Your work will define how agentic security operates across public cloud, on-premises, sovereign cloud, and air-gapped environments, where reliability, control, auditability, and customer trust are non-negotiable.