Technical Lead - AI Defense & Real-Time Inference

Cisco Systems, Inc.

Milpitas (CA)

On-site

USD 216,000 - 281,000

Full time

4 days ago

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Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision insurance

401(k) with company match

Paid parental leave

Generous vacation and sick time

Job summary

Cisco Systems, Inc. is seeking a Technical Lead for its AI Defense team. You will own the architecture of secure, scalable AI infrastructure and act as a hands-on authority shaping product design and engineering culture.

The role emphasizes leading complex technical challenges and setting industry standards. You will drive low-latency LLM inference, secure deployments, and collaboration with product and threat research teams while mentoring engineers and aligning with executive leadership on

Qualifications

Bachelor's/Master's/PhD in CS with 8+ years (MS) or 3+ years (PhD) of software engineering experience.
Experience with cloud-native backend development and modern cloud infrastructure.
Prior leadership experience across teams while remaining hands-on.

Responsibilities

Define and drive architecture of scalable, high-performance platform services for AI defense in real time.
Lead by example on complex technical problems and stay hands-on.
Shape LLM inference and model-hosting strategy for enterprise workloads.
Collaborate with Product, Threat Research and Ops to deploy production-grade features.
Mentor engineers and communicate strategy and trade-offs to senior leadership.