Senior Staff Engineer — Agentic Identity Architect

Cisco Systems, Inc; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 214,000 - 310,000; Full time

Job summary

Cisco Systems, Inc. seeks a Technical Leader to define and build core identity capabilities across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid architectures for AI agents. Lead technical strategy from concept through deployment, delivering scalable secure non-human identity solutions.

You will collaborate with Security, AI Platform, Product, and Cloud Operations teams, mentor engineers, and prototype MVPs that translate complex identity and access challenges into enterprise-grade software.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field with 12+ years of software engineering experience.
• 10+ years of experience designing and building distributed systems, backend services, or security platforms in production environments.
• 5+ years of experience implementing enterprise identity, authentication, or access protocols (such as OAuth 2.0/2.1, OIDC, SAML, SCIM, LDAP, SPIFFE, or mTLS).
• 4+ years of experience with containerization technologies (Docker, containerd, or Kubernetes) and at least one major cloud platform (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• 3+ years of experience with security engineering principles, including threat modeling, attack-path analysis, or security architecture reviews.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build core identity capabilities for AI agents across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid architectures.
• Deliver developer tooling and APIs to enable adoption across platform teams (MCP-based access).
• Drive cross-functional alignment with Security, AI Platform, Product, and Cloud Operations.
• Lead technical excellence through architecture direction, reviews, and mentoring engineers.
• Deliver production MVPs: prototype and validate identity/security solutions and scale to production services.

Skills

Distributed systems design

Backend services development

Security engineering principles

Containerization (Docker/Kubernetes)

Go/C/C++/Java programming

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/CE/EE or related (12+ years)

Master's degree with 8+ years of relevant experience

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

AWS/Azure/GCP

Job description

Cisco Systems, Inc. seeks a Technical Leader to define and build core identity capabilities across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid architectures for AI agents. Lead technical strategy from concept through deployment, delivering scalable secure non-human identity solutions.

You will collaborate with Security, AI Platform, Product, and Cloud Operations teams, mentor engineers, and prototype MVPs that translate complex identity and access challenges into enterprise-grade software.