Senior Staff Software Engineer, AI-Driven Agentic SOC

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

Job summary

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

You will shape direction and drive production improvements across on‑prem and cloud environments. You will design agents and supporting systems for grounded reasoning, planning, tool use, memory, tracing, auditability, and safe failure handling, with

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.
• Bachelors + 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 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.
• Define measurable success criteria for AI capabilities, including task completion, groundedness, tool-use correctness, trajectory quality, human intervention, safety, latency, cost, and reliability.
• Establish closed-loop, metrics-driven development using golden datasets, offline and online evaluations, production traces, SME and customer feedback, experiments, and regression gates.

Skills

Distributed systems

AI-enabled production systems

Python

Go

Cross-team leadership

Education

Bachelors + 10 years of related experience

Masters + 6 years of related experience

PhD + 3 years of related experience

Job description

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

You will shape direction and drive production improvements across on‑prem and cloud environments. You will design agents and supporting systems for grounded reasoning, planning, tool use, memory, tracing, auditability, and safe failure handling, with