Technical Lead, AI-Native Software Engineering (hybrid) - 2025652

Cisco; San Jose (CA); Hybrid; USD 172,000 - 245,000; Full time

Job summary

Cisco is seeking a Technical Lead for AI-Native Software Engineering (hybrid), focusing on security tooling and architecture. You will guide engineers on critical architectural decisions, set strategic direction, and collaborate across teams to resolve complex engineering challenges with urgency.

You will lead by example, review designs and code, and apply AI-native development practices to accelerate secure software delivery.

Qualifications

• Extensive hands-on software engineering experience with architecture decisions for critical systems.
• Deep expertise in design, architecture, implementation, and scaling of software.
• Experience guiding or mentoring engineers without formal management responsibility.
• Fluency in AI-native software development practices to model and guide team decisions.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction across the team’s portfolio and escalate decisions requiring deep expertise.
• Lead on the hardest technical problems requiring optimized, defensible architecture.
• Guide engineers in sound technical and architectural choices with well-reasoned judgment.
• Collaborate with leaders on cross-team problems to drive shared decisions with urgency.
• Stay hands-on enough to review designs and code where it matters.

Skills

Software engineering

Architecture design

Mentoring engineers

AI-native practices

Education

BS or MS in CS/CE or related field

Job description

The application window is expected to close on: 10/29/2026 Technical Lead, AI-Native Software Engineering (hybrid) - 2025652 *hybrid role, some onsite activity required

Meet the Team

The Security Workflow Engineering team, as part of the Security & Trust Organization, is responsible for engineering and delivering tools that help discover, mitigate, and report on security engineering across every application, platform, and service that Cisco delivers to its customers. It is our responsibility to provide an end-to-end digital experience with automation to help engineering across Cisco. At our core, we are a team of engineers, with a focus on AI assisted security tooling, committed to helping develop tools that strive to seamlessly integrate and support building security into the development workflow.

Your Impact We're looking for a Technical Lead to set the technical direction across our team's full body of work. It's a role for someone whose depth of software engineering experience makes them the person the team turns to when an architectural decision actually matters. You'll be front and center on the technology-heavy problems: the ones that need a strong, well-reasoned opinion, not just a functioning solution. You'll guide engineers on how to make sound technical and architectural choices, by bringing hard-won judgment that your reasoning holds up under scrutiny. You'll also work across team boundaries with other technical leaders, reasoning through shared problems and driving decisions that drive forward progress. This work moves fast, and you bring a real sense of urgency to it — treating technical debt and open decisions as things to resolve now, not eventually.

You will:

• Set technical direction across the team's portfolio of work and be the person engineers Escalates to when a decision genuinely needs deep expertise.
• Take the lead on the hardest technical problems — the ones that call for a strongly reasoned, optimized, and defensible architecture.
• Guide software engineers on making sound technical and architectural choices, sharing the judgment that comes from having made — and learned from — those choices many times before.
• Collaborate with technical leaders on other teams to reason through cross-cutting problems and drive shared decisions forward, with urgency.
• Stay hands-on enough to be credible: reviewing designs and code where it matters, not managing from a distance.

Who You Are

Software engineering is a passion for you, not just a skill you picked up — it shows in the depth and care behind your technical opinions. You have vast, hands-on software engineering experience, and it shows in how quickly you can spot the right architecture for a problem versus one that will cause pain down the line. You form strong, well-reasoned technical opinions and can defend them logically, while staying genuinely open to adapting to novel ideas for solving challenges. You’re comfortable being the person accountable for technical decisions, not just contributing an opinion among many. You can guide and influence other engineers' technical judgment without formal authority over them. You work well with other technical leaders who don't report to you, building enough credibility and trust that decisions get made rather than stalled. You operate with a sense of urgency — you know the difference between a decision that deserves careful deliberation and one that's just sitting there costing the team time.

Minimum Qualifications

• BS or MS degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field, or demonstrated equivalent experience.
• Extensive, hands-on software engineering experience, with a track record of making architectural decisions for systems that mattered and held up.
• Deep expertise in software engineering - design architecture, implementation, scale - sufficient to propose and defend highly optimized, well-reasoned technical designs under scrutiny.
• Demonstrated experience guiding or mentoring other engineers on technical and architectural decision-making, without formal management responsibility.
• Fluency in AI-native software development practices, since you'll be expected to model and guide the same judgment you're asking the team to develop.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building tools in the security space — product/application security, threat intelligence, compliance/governance
• Experience designing APIs, tools, or services that AI agents use directly (e.g., MCP servers or function/tool interfaces)
• Experience setting up AI-native practices for an AI-native software engineering team.

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.

Message to applicants applying to work in the U.S. and/or Canada:

The starting salary range posted for this position is $171,600.00 to $245,000.00 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. The full salary range for certain locations is listed below. For loca