Senior Staff AI Security Engineer (Agentic SOC)

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

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental, and vision insurance

401(k) with Cisco matching

Paid parental leave

Job summary

Cisco Systems, Inc. seeks a Senior Staff Software Engineer for its Security Core AI team. You will build shared platforms, orchestration, and evaluation systems enabling trusted AI agents across Cisco and Splunk security products.

You will drive patterns for grounded reasoning, tool use, memory, and governance while delivering production-grade security capabilities across cloud and on-prem environments. This role is hybrid with on-site requirements in San Jose or San Francisco.

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 Master’s + 6 years of related experience, or PhD + 3 years of related experience.

Responsibilities

• Shape technical direction and lead ambiguous, cross-team Agentic SOC capabilities from concept through measurable 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

AI-enabled production systems

Cross-team collaboration

Education

Bachelor's + 10 years related experience / Master’s + 6 / PhD + 3

Job description

Cisco Systems, Inc. seeks a Senior Staff Software Engineer for its Security Core AI team. You will build shared platforms, orchestration, and evaluation systems enabling trusted AI agents across Cisco and Splunk security products.

You will drive patterns for grounded reasoning, tool use, memory, and governance while delivering production-grade security capabilities across cloud and on-prem environments. This role is hybrid with on-site requirements in San Jose or San Francisco.