Cisco
Machine Learning Engineering Technical Leader
$234K–$384K
San Jose, California, US +1 · Hybrid · Full-time · Posted Oct 20, 2026
- Location
- San Jose, California, US
San Francisco, California, US - Experience
- 12+ years with a Bachelor’s; 10+ years with a Master’s; 7+ years with a PhD; or an equivalent combination of education and verified industry software engineering experience. Also requires 8+ years in distributed systems and 4+ years in enterprise authentication and authorization.
- Education
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or related technical discipline; or Master’s; or PhD; or an equivalent combination of education and verified industry software engineering experience.
About the job
Leads architecture and cross-team delivery of Cisco’s distributed AI platform, focusing on agentic AI orchestration, identity, multi-tenancy, service security, and production resilience.
What you'll do
- Set architectural direction and author technical specifications, breaking platform designs into work across engineering teams.
- Strengthen service-to-service security through cryptographic identity signing and zero-trust verification; lead CVE remediation and production triage.
- Establish engineering standards and mentor senior engineers.
What they ask for
- Bachelor’s degree in a related technical discipline plus 12+ years of software engineering experience; or a Master’s plus 10+ years; or a PhD plus 7+ years; or an equivalent combination of education and verified industry software engineering experience.
- At least 8 years designing, building, and operating production distributed backend microservices, with proficiency in Go and Python.
- At least 4 years designing and implementing enterprise authentication and authorization systems.
- Experience with code generation tools and agents for software development; AI/agentic systems; and deploying services on Kubernetes with automated secret management and distributed tracing.
Nice to have
- Experience with API gateways, gRPC/protobuf, distributed workflow engines, event streaming, and feature flag management.
- Experience with security remediation programs, vector and relational databases, and red-team testing groups.
Pay
$256,900.00 to $333,400.00 (base salary); $256,900.00 - $383,500.00 (base salary); $234,400.00 - $341,100.00 (base salary)
Tools
Go, Python, OAuth 2.0 / OIDC, JWT, RFC 8693 token exchange, mTLS, Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry/APM
AI focus
Build and integrate agentic AI capabilities, including LLM orchestration frameworks, agentic runtimes, tool-calling interfaces, and MCP servers; use code generation tools and agents in software development.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative