# Technical Lead

**Company**: Cisco
**Location**: Milpitas, California
**Work arrangement**: hybrid
**Experience**: senior
**Job type**: full-time
**Salary**: $216,300.00 to $280,800.00
**Category**: Engineering
**Industry**: Technology

**Apply**: https://cisco.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Cisco_Careers/job/Milpitas-California-US/Lead-Machine-Learning-Engineer---AI-Defense--Hybrid-_2028766?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_f0b1a248-51d

## Description

Join Cisco's AI Defense team as a Technical Lead, serving as a hands-on technical authority for AI Defense. You will own the systems that detect, validate, and stop threats to AI. Your work will set the engineering standards for the team and directly shape how Cisco secures AI for its customers.

Responsibilities:

- Define and drive the architecture of scalable, high-performance platform services that protect AI applications and agents in real time.

- Remain hands-on in design and implementation, leading by example on the most complex and ambiguous technical problems.

- Shape LLM inference and model-hosting strategy, balancing latency, cost, and scale for enterprise workloads.

- Partner with Product, Threat Research, and Ops to deploy production-grade features and capabilities, delivered with operational excellence.

- Act as a technical thought leader and mentor, raising the engineering bar and communicating complex strategy and trade-offs to senior leadership.

Minimum Qualifications:

- Bachelor's in Computer Science and 10+ years or Master's and 8+ years or PHD and 3+ years of software engineering experience, including architecting and delivering large-scale distributed systems.

- Experience with cloud-native backend development and modern cloud infrastructure.

- Prior experience with technical leadership across teams while remaining hands-on.

Preferred Qualifications:

- Experience with LLM inference, generative AI systems, or AI/ML infrastructure.

- Background in security products or AI security.

- Experience delivering SaaS and hybrid enterprise deployments.

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, including 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

- Non-exempt employees receive 16 days of paid vacation time per full calendar year

- Exempt employees participate in Cisco's flexible vacation time off program

- 80 hours of sick time off provided on hire date and each January 1st thereafter

- Optional 10 paid days per full calendar year to volunteer

## Skills

### Required
- Computer Science
- cloud-native backend development
- modern cloud infrastructure
- technical leadership
- large-scale distributed systems

### Nice to have
- LLM inference
- generative AI systems
- AI/ML infrastructure
- security products
- AI security
- SaaS
- hybrid enterprise deployments

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Source: [Apply at cisco.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com](https://cisco.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Cisco_Careers/job/Milpitas-California-US/Lead-Machine-Learning-Engineer---AI-Defense--Hybrid-_2028766?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply)