Senior Tech Lead, Agentic AI Platform & Security

Cisco Systems, Inc.; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 257,000 - 333,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision

401(k) with Cisco matching

Paid parental leave

Paid time off

Job summary

Cisco Systems, Inc. in San Jose, CA is seeking a Senior Technical Lead to own the architectural direction of our distributed AI platform.

You will decompose complex system designs into executable work streams, and define end-to-end specifications across multiple engineering teams. You will harden service-to-service communication with cryptographic identity, enable zero-trust, drive CVE remediation, and mentor senior engineers to raise the platform's technical maturity.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or related technical discipline + 12+ years of professional software engineering experience; OR Master's degree with 8+ years; OR PhD with 5+ years; OR an equivalent combination of education and verified industry software engineering experience.
• Minimum of 7 years designing, building, and operating high-concurrency, distributed backend microservices in production, with experience in both Go and Python.
• Minimum of 4 years designing and implementing enterprise authentication and authorization systems (e.g., OAuth 2.0 / OIDC, JWT, RFC 8693 token exchange, mTLS).
• Experience leveraging code gen tools and agents for software development.
• Experience building or integrating LLM orchestration frameworks, agentic runtimes (e.g., ReAct), tool-calling interfaces, or Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers.
• Experience deploying and operating services on Kubernetes with automated secret management and distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry/APM).

Responsibilities

• Own the architectural direction and cross-service technical execution for the distributed AI platform.
• Author end-to-end technical specifications and decompose complex system designs into executable work streams.
• Harden service-to-service communication with cryptographic identity signing and zero-trust verification.
• Lead remediation programs (CVE remediation and production triage) to maintain stability and security resilience.
• Mentor senior engineers to raise the platform's technical maturity.

Skills

Go & Python

Distributed systems

Identity & security

AI software lifecycle

LLM orchestration

Education

Bachelor's in CS/CE/EE

Master's in CS/EE

PhD in related field

Tools

Kubernetes

OpenTelemetry

Temporal

gRPC

PostgreSQL

Job description

Cisco Systems, Inc. in San Jose, CA is seeking a Senior Technical Lead to own the architectural direction of our distributed AI platform.

You will decompose complex system designs into executable work streams, and define end-to-end specifications across multiple engineering teams. You will harden service-to-service communication with cryptographic identity, enable zero-trust, drive CVE remediation, and mentor senior engineers to raise the platform's technical maturity.