Software Engineering Technical Leader

In Cisco Enterprise AI Platforms & Infrastructure (EAIPI), our vision is to architect, build, and scale world-class agentic AI platforms, foundation infrastructure, and developer ecosystems that power Cisco's next generation of intelligent products and services.

As a Software Engineering Technical Leader in Cisco EAIPI, you will serve as a multi-layered technical authority and system architect. You will design complete and complex frameworks, systems, and platforms that define specifications, interfaces, input/output pipelines, and working parameters for hardware and software compatibility.

Responsibilities:

• Architectural Vision & Complex Problem Solving: Apply specialized technical mastery to solve intricate architectural problems, interpret internal and external business issues, and define industry-leading standard methodologies.
• Cross-Team Leadership & Project Governance: Lead multi-team engineering initiatives from inception through completion, leading workload, technical dependencies, and workstreams holistically.
• Technical Roadmap & Strategy: Shape, influence, and drive the multi-year software engineering roadmap, aligning technical architecture with core business and customer outcomes.
• High-Impact Feature & Framework Delivery: Lead the end-to-end design, implementation, and delivery of major architectural frameworks, critical platform subsystems, and high-impact features.
• Gold-Standard Code Craftsmanship: Author clean, robust, and highly optimized code and automated test suites that set the gold standard for engineering excellence across the organization.
• Scalability, Security & Reliability by Design: Champion architectural principles centered on steadfast security, substantial scalability, token throughput, and high-availability runtime reliability.
• Threat Modeling & Security Architecture: Drive product threat modeling, identify vulnerability attack surfaces, and enforce zero-trust privacy and compliance standards across platform components.
• Observability & Proactive Risk Resolution: Proactively identify, prioritize, and eliminate systemic risks; design robust observability tooling to monitor telemetry, act on real-time alerts, and optimize runtime performance.
• Production Operations & SRE Governance: Serve as the ultimate technical escalation point for critical production outages, lead blameless postmortems, review RCAs, and govern robust on-call rotations.
• Multi-Component Domain Authority: Serve as a recognized authority on multiple functional components, subsystems, and developer APIs across the broader AI ecosystem.
• Product Sense, Market Awareness & Metrics: Articulate complex design trade-offs, integrate market and competitive dynamics into technical choices, and track product adoption and performance metrics.
• Scoping & Stakeholder Negotiation: Provide accurate project scoping, establish reliable landmark estimations, and negotiate technical trade-offs with multi-functional stakeholders.
• SDLC & Agile Excellence: Advance agile engineering practices, elevate SDLC standards, and establish modern engineering workflows across teams and partner organizations.
• Mentorship & Engineering Culture: Mentor and sponsor senior engineers, tech leads, and peers; develop continuous knowledge sharing through architecture brownbag sessions, technical blogs, and external publications.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or related STEM field + 8 years of related experience; OR Master’s degree + 6 years of related experience; OR Ph.D. + 3 years of related experience.
• In-depth conceptual and practical expertise in software engineering, distributed systems, and platform architecture, with a confirmed history of mastering and applying a wide spectrum of modern technologies.
• Mastery of hands-on software development in core languages (e.g., Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, Go, C++, or Rust) with demonstrated success in designing and shipping enterprise-scale, critically important systems.
• Consistent track record of serving as a technical lead or systems architect for multi-functional engineering teams, authoring technical design RFCs, and establishing engineering standard methodologies across the SDLC.
• Extensive experience in system profiling, distributed debugging, automated testing strategy, and leading high-severity production root cause analysis (RCA).

Preferred Qualifications

• Advanced expertise in Generative AI architectures, Agentic AI systems, Model Context Protocol (MCP), LangGraph, LlamaIndex, vLLM, and multi-agent coordination frameworks.
• Deep experience architecting high-throughput, low-latency microservices, event streaming platforms (Kafka), asynchronous state machines, and distributed caching (Redis).
• Proven knowledge of GPU computing infrastructure, CUDA optimization, Triton Inference Server, high-density server architectures, and container orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker).
• Expertise in enterprise identity, security, and access protocols including OAuth 2.0 / RFC 8693 Token Exchange, Zero Trust architecture, and automated threat modeling.
• Demonstrated experience designing enterprise observability frameworks (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk) with automated canary and self-healing deployment pipelines.
• Active technical contributions to open-source software, published whitepapers, patents in AI/systems engineering, or prominent tech talks at world-class industry conferences.
• Outstanding executive communication, negotiation, and partner management skills, capable of influencing senior engineering leadership and product direction.