Software Engineering Technical Leader - BackEnd

020 Cisco Systems, Inc.; Richardson (TX); On-site; USD 152,000 - 222,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

401(k) with Cisco matching

Paid parental leave

Disability coverage

Life insurance

RSUs / stock grants

Paid time off

Volunteer days

Job summary

Cisco Systems, Inc. is seeking a Software Engineering Technical Leader within the Customer Experience (CX) engineering organization. You will drive the next generation of enterprise AI platforms, scale multi-tenant cloud systems, and mentor engineering leaders across teams.

Lead architecture reviews, define standards for API contracts and data security, and collaborate with product leadership to align long-term strategy with execution blueprints.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's in a related field with substantial experience.
• 8+ years in related roles; 4+ years as a technical lead on large-scale systems.
• Proficient in Python and production-grade microservices.

Responsibilities

• Define multi-year roadmaps and drive enterprise AI platforms.
• Architect multi-tenant cloud platforms with scalable microservices.
• Mentor Lead Software Engineers and guide architectural decisions.
• Ensure security, governance, and observability across systems.

Skills

Python

Cloud-native ecosystems

Kubernetes

Docker

API design (gRPC/REST/GraphQL)

DDD (Domain-Driven Design)

Kafka

PostgreSQL

Redis

Education

Bachelor's degree

Master's degree

Tools

Kubernetes

Docker

Apache Kafka

Redis

PostgreSQL

DynamoDB/Cassandra

HashiCorp Vault

OAuth2/OIDC

OpenTelemetry

Prometheus

Grafana

Job description

The application window is expected to close on: 10/29/2026.

Meet the Team

Cisco’s Customer Experience (CX) engineering organization is a global team of experts dedicated to delivering world‑class digital experiences by building advanced AI applications and capabilities through an industry leading platform centric approach with Cisco IQ. These capabilities provide high value directly to our customers and partners and empower our internal teams to deliver superior, data‑driven services. We pride ourselves on a culture that thrives on customer‑centricity and technical rigor, solving complex challenges leveraging AI/ML solutions.

Your Impact

As a Software Engineering Technical Leader in Cisco’s CX Engineering organization, you will serve as the principal technical authority driving the next generation of enterprise AI and cloud‑native platforms. Scaling beyond team‑level execution, you will define multi‑year roadmaps, bridge complex business goals with high‑throughput architectures, and elevate engineering excellence by mentoring technical leaders across the organization.

• Strategic Architectural Vision: Lead the end‑to‑end design and system topology for multi‑tenant cloud platforms, evaluating emerging technologies to drive governance across microservices and hybrid data environments.
• Enterprise AI & Autonomous Systems: Architect foundational AI applications, including distributed Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG), agentic workflows, multi‑modal LLM orchestrations, and secure vector retrieval systems.
• High‑Scale Distributed Systems: Design fault‑tolerant, elastic systems by establishing company‑wide standards for concurrency control, high‑throughput messaging (Apache Kafka), caching, and multi‑region data persistence.
• Security, Compliance & Resilience: Enforce zero‑trust integration patterns and data protection standards (HashiCorp Vault, OAuth2/OIDC) while ensuring compliance with enterprise Service Level Objectives (SLOs).
• Technical Governance & Engineering Standards: Conduct global architecture review boards (ARBs) and champion best practices across API contracts (gRPC/REST), Kubernetes orchestration, CI/CD, and observability.
• Leadership & Organizational Influence: Mentor Lead Software Engineers and drive technical consensus across matrixed pods, aligning disparate technology stacks toward unified enterprise goals.
• Executive Alignment: Partner with product and engineering executives to translate long‑term business strategy into actionable execution blueprints.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s with 8+ years of related experience or Master’s with 6+ years of related experience.
• 4+ years’ experience in software development as a Technical Lead or similar lead role across large scale systems.
• Python experience building production grade microservices and event driven architectures.
• Technical experience in cloud‑native ecosystems (such as AWS, GCP, or Azure), container orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker), and automated CI/CD infrastructures.
• Experience designing high‑concurrency, distributed data pipelines and messaging systems (e.g., Apache Kafka, Redis, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB/Cassandra).
• Background in API contract design (gRPC, REST, GraphQL) and systemic domain‑driven design (DDD).

Preferred Qualifications

• Strategic Product Vision: Demonstrated success in shaping overarching backend product strategies and data architectures, including evaluating and implementing pioneering capabilities (example – AI driven pipelines) to influence multi‑year business roadmaps.
• AI/ML Platform Architecture: Demonstrated history architecting scalable MLOps, LLM integration frameworks, agentic AI platforms, fine‑tuning infrastructure, or large‑scale hybrid/vector search engine integrations (e.g., Pinecone, Qdrant).
• Operational Excellence: Experience establishing observability platforms (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana), chaos engineering protocols, and formal site reliability engineering (SRE) frameworks.
• Industry & Strategic Influence: Active involvement in driving open‑source contributions, technology patents, enterprise architecture standards, or speaking at industry conferences.
• Soft Skills: Demonstrated ability to navigate ambiguity, drive technical consensus, and communicate complex architectural concepts to divers stakeholders.

Why Cisco?

At Cisco, we’re revolutionizing how data and infrastructure connect and protect organizations in the AI era – and beyond. We’ve been innovating fearlessly for 40 years to create solutions that power how humans and technology work together across the physical and digital worlds. These solutions provide customers with unparalleled security, visibility, and insights across the entire digital footprint. Fueled by the depth and breadth of our technology, we experiment and create meaningful solutions. Add to that our worldwide network of doers and experts, and you’ll see that the opportunities to grow and build are limitless. We work as a team, collaborating with empathy to make really big things happen on a global scale. Because our solutions are everywhere, our impact is everywhere. We are Cisco, and our power starts with you.

Compensation & Benefits

The starting salary range posted for this position is $151,600.00 to $222,400.00 and reflects the projected salary range for new hires in this position in U.S. and/or Canada locations, not including incentive compensation*, equity, or benefits. Individual pay is determined by the candidate's hiring location, market conditions, job‑related skillset, experience, qualifications, education, certifications, and/or training.

• U.S. employees are offered benefits, subject to Cisco’s plan eligibility rules, which include medical, dental and vision insurance, a 401(k) plan with a Cisco matching contribution, paid parental leave, short and long‑term disability coverage, and basic life insurance.
• Employees may be eligible to receive grants of Cisco restricted stock units, which vest following continued employment with Cisco for defined periods.
• U.S. employees are eligible for paid time away as described below, subject to Cisco’s policies: 10 paid holidays per full calendar year, plus 1 floating holiday for non‑exempt employees, 1 paid day off for employee’s birthday, paid year‑end holiday shutdown, and 4 paid days off for personal wellness determined by Cisco.
• Non‑exempt employees** receive 16 days of paid vacation time per full calendar year, accrued at rate of 4.92 hours per pay period for full‑time employees. Exempt employees participate in Cisco’s flexible vacation time off program, which has no defined limit on how much vacation time eligible employees may use (subject to availability and some business limitations).
• 80 hours of sick time off provided on hire date and each January 1st thereafter, and up to 80 hours of unused sick time carried forward from one calendar year to the next.
• Additional paid time away may be requested to deal with critical or emergency issues for family members.
• Optional 10 paid days per full calendar year to volunteer.
• For non‑sales roles, employees are also eligible to earn annual bonuses subject to Cisco’s policies.
• Employees on sales plans earn performance‑based incentive pay on top of their base salary, which is split between quota and non‑quota components, subject to the applicable Cisco plan.
• For quota‑based incentive pay, Cisco typically pays as follows: .75% of incentive target for each 1% of revenue attainment up to 50% of quota; 1.5% of incentive target for each 1% of attainment between 50% and 75%; 1% of incentive target for each 1% of attainment between 75% and 100%; and Once performance exceeds 100% attainment, incentive rates are at or above 1% for each 1% of attainment with no cap on incentive compensation.
• For non‑quota‑based sales performance elements such as strategic sales objectives, Cisco may pay 0% up to 125% of target.
• Cisco sales plans do not have a minimum threshold of performance for sales incentive compensation to be paid.

Application Window

Application window closes on: 10/29/2026.