Technical Leader - AIOps & Agentic Platform

Cisco; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 216,000 - 281,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k) matching

Annual bonuses

Comprehensive health plans

Paid holidays

Job summary

Join Cisco Mobility Services within the Mass-Scale Infrastructure Group and help design, build, and deploy production-grade AI agents that automate complex SRE and infrastructure operations. You will contribute to architectural design, implement telemetry integrations, and drive reliable, secure agent behaviors in production.

The role emphasizes strong backend development, experience with LLMs, and leadership across engineering teams to deliver measurable improvements in operational efficiency

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field with 10+ years of relevant software engineering experience, or Master's with 8+ years, or PhD with 5+ years.
• 8+ years of experience building, testing, and deploying backend software, operational tooling, or platform services within large-scale distributed environments.
• Proven track record of authoring at least 3+ major design proposals/RFCs and leading system design reviews for complex technical implementations.
• 5+ years of deep proficiency in Python, Go, Java, or Rust, with proven expertise in concurrency, data structures, and API development.
• 2+ years of practical experience developing with LLMs, including documented success in prompt engineering, tool/function calling, or transitioning AI agents from prototype to production.

Responsibilities

• Build & scale agentic operations: Design, build, and deliver production-grade AI agents, multi-agent workflows, and platform capabilities that automate and optimize complex SRE and infrastructure operations.
• Participate in architectural design: Contribute to architectural reviews, design specifications, and technical trade-off discussions for agentic platform interfaces and observability pipelines.
• Autonomous' incident & anomaly remediation: Develop intelligent operational workflows applying AI/ML, statistical analysis, and causal inference to real-time anomaly detection and automated RCA.
• Telemetry & tool integration: Design and implement integrations with telemetry frameworks, distributed monitoring systems, APIs, and cloud/on-prem environments.
• Production reliability & guardrails: Implement automated testing, evaluation harnesses, HITL gates, and deployment pipelines to ensure deterministic, safe, and secure agent behaviors.
• Cross-team technical leadership: Collaborate with Principal Engineers, software engineers, data scientists, and operations teams to integrate AI capabilities into core platform workflows and mentor team members.
• Measurable operational outcomes: Report on MTTR reduction and automation efficiency to refine agent performance and tool capabilities.

Skills

Backend software engineering

RFCs / design proposals

Languages: Python/Go/Java/Rust

LLM development

Concurreny & APIs

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science/Engineering or related field

Master's degree in related field

PhD in related field

Tools

OpenTelemetry

Prometheus

Kafka

Pulsar

Elasticsearch

Vector databases

Job description

The application window is expected to close on: 12/28/2026

Meet the team

You will join the Cisco Mobility Services organization, part of the Mass-Scale Infrastructure Group (MIG) within Cisco. Cisco IoT Control Center is the #1 best-in-class cellular connectivity management platform, supporting over 300 million connected devices globally across critically important enterprise and telecom networks. Our global organization is responsible for end-to-end engineering and production operations of the platform.

Your impact

• Build & scale agentic operations: Design, build, and deliver production-grade AI agents, multi-agent workflows, and platform capabilities that automate and optimize complex SRE and infrastructure operations.
• Participate in architectural design: Actively contribute to architectural reviews, design specifications, and technical trade-off discussions for agentic platform interfaces, tool integration frameworks (e.g., Model Context Protocol / MCP), and observability pipelines.
• Autonomous' incident & anomaly remediation: Develop intelligent operational workflows applying AI/ML, statistical analysis, and causal inference to real-time anomaly detection, automated root-cause analysis (RCA), and proactive incident mitigation.
• Telemetry & tool integration: Design and implement integrations with existing telemetry frameworks, distributed monitoring systems, APIs, and cloud/on-prem environments to power real-time AI context gathering.
• Production reliability & guardrails: Implement robust automated testing, evaluation harnesses, human-in-the-loop (HITL) approval gates, and deployment pipelines to ensure deterministic, safe, and secure agent behaviors in production.
• Cross-team technical leadership: Collaborate closely with Principal Engineers, software engineers, data scientists, and operations teams to integrate AI capabilities smoothly into core platform workflows and mentor team members on AI engineering standard processes.
• Measurable operational outcomes: Measure and report on operational benchmark gains, MTTR reduction, and automation efficiency to continuously refine agent performance and tool capabilities.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field with 10+ years of relevant software engineering experience, or Master's degree with 8+ years, or PhD with 5+ years.
• 8+ years of experience building, testing, and deploying backend software, operational tooling, or platform services within large-scale distributed environments.
• Proven track record of authoring at least 3+ major design proposals/RFCs and leading system design reviews for complex technical implementations.
• 5+ years of deep proficiency in Python, Go, Java, or Rust, with proven expertise in concurrency, data structures, and API development.
• 2+ years of practical experience developing with LLMs, including documented success in prompt engineering, tool/function calling, or transitioning AI agents from prototype to production.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with modern agent orchestration, semantic search, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and standard tool integration interfaces (e.g., MCP, function schemas).
• Experience working with distributed telemetry and data pipelines (e.g., OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Kafka/Pulsar, Elasticsearch, Vector Databases).
• Practical exposure to SRE practices, CI/CD automation, Kubernetes/container environments, and runbook orchestration.
• Experience building evaluation benchmarks, structured output validation, or security guardrails for production AI systems.

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 $216,300.00 to $280,800.00 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 locations not listed below, the recruiter can share more details about compensation for the role in your location during the hiring process.

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. Please see the Cisco careers site to discover more benefits and perks. Employees may be eligible to receive grants of Cisco restricted stock units, which vest following continued employment with Cisco for defined periods of time.

• 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.

The applicable full salary ranges for this position, by specific state, are listed below:

New York City Metro Area

$216,300.00 - $322,900.00

Non-Metro New York State & Washington State

$197,500.00 - $287,300.00

• For quota-based sales roles on Cisco’s sales plan, the ranges provided in this posting include base pay and sales target incentive compensation combined.
• Employees in Illinois, whether exempt or non-exempt, will participate in a unique time off program to meet local requirements.