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From the employer's careers site First seen 31 Oct 2026 · Still live on 4 Nov 2026

Senior Staff Software Engineer

Cisco San Jose, California Hybrid senior full-time

Salary

$214,100 to $309,800 per year

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Description

Build the next generation Agentic SOC for a world where threats are created, adapted, and launched at machine speed. As a Senior Staff Software Engineer on Cisco's Security Core AI team, you will help turn that vision into reality. You will build the shared platforms, orchestration, and evaluation systems that enable trusted AI agents across Cisco and Splunk security products.

Your Impact:

  • Shape technical direction and lead ambiguous, cross-team Agentic SOC capabilities from concept through measurable production improvement.
  • Design and build reusable capabilities spanning agent runtime, orchestration, governed tool use, context and memory, evaluation systems, trace analysis, and quality gates.
  • Translate SOC, SIEM, detection, incident, investigation, and response needs into shared mechanisms in partnership with security-domain experts.
  • Design agents and supporting systems for grounded reasoning, planning, delegation, human oversight, traceability, auditability, and safe failure handling.
  • Define measurable success criteria for AI capabilities, including task completion, groundedness, tool-use correctness, trajectory quality, human intervention, safety, latency, cost, and reliability.

Minimum Qualifications:

  • 6+ years of experience developing, testing, and/or operating production software.
  • Experience building and/or operating large-scale distributed or AI-enabled production systems, with experience programming with Python or Go.
  • Bachelors + 10 years of related experience, or Masters + 6 years of related experience, or PhD + 3 years of related experience.

Preferred Qualifications:

  • Experience with LLM and agentic-system concepts including grounding, planning, tool use, memory, human oversight, evaluation, tracing, and regression analysis.
  • Demonstrated experience defining AI metrics, building evaluation and experimentation loops, and connecting offline results to production behavior and customer outcomes.
  • Experience delivering software across public cloud, on-premises, sovereign cloud, or air-gapped environments.

Benefits:

  • Medical, dental and vision insurance
  • 401(k) plan with a Cisco matching contribution
  • Paid parental leave
  • Short and long-term disability coverage
  • Basic life insurance
  • Paid time away (10 paid holidays per full calendar year, plus 1 floating holiday for non-exempt employees)
  • Flexible vacation time off program
  • 80 hours of sick time off provided on hire date and each January 1st thereafter

Skills

Nice to have

  • LLM
  • agentic-system concepts
  • grounding
  • planning
  • tool use
  • memory
  • human oversight
  • evaluation
  • tracing
  • regression analysis
Apply on Cisco