Cisco
Principal Software Engineer, AI Defense (Hybrid)
$241K–$417K
Milpitas, California, US · Hybrid · Principal · Full-time · Posted Oct 30, 2026
- Experience
- 15+ years with a bachelor’s degree, 12+ years with a master’s degree, or 8+ years with a Ph.D.; also requires 8+ years of hands-on software development and 5+ years in cybersecurity.
- Education
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, master’s degree, or Ph.D.
About the job
Leads the architecture and development of enterprise AI security platforms that protect AI models, agents, and workflows from cyber threats.
What you'll do
- Own the technical vision and design for AI Defense control planes, data planes, policy engines, and posture assessment services.
- Build and deploy high-throughput microservices and APIs, and develop runtime protections against prompt injection, jailbreaks, and tool abuse.
- Set cross-organizational security strategy and translate customer requirements into production software.
What they ask for
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science and 15+ years of relevant software engineering experience, Master’s degree and 12+ years, or Ph.D. and 8+ years building enterprise-scale distributed systems.
- 8+ years of hands-on development with Go, Python, or Java for production microservices, SDKs, and REST/gRPC APIs.
- Experience architecting and operating multi-tenant cloud-native infrastructure on AWS or GCP, including Kubernetes and event-driven streaming.
- 5+ years of cybersecurity engineering experience, plus experience building, debugging, or securing production LLM applications, agentic frameworks, or MCP architectures.
Nice to have
- Expertise in AI safety engineering, including prompt-injection defenses, graph-based security models, runtime model observability, and policy-as-code.
- Experience leading greenfield platform initiatives, zero-downtime migrations, or implementing zero-trust boundaries, secrets management, service meshes, and DevSecOps pipelines.
Pay
$250,600.00 to $362,600.00 USD (base salary); $250,600.00 - $416,900.00 USD (base salary); $241,400.00 - $371,000.00 USD (base salary)
Tools
Go, Python, Java, AWS, GCP, Kubernetes (EKS/GKE), Kafka/MSK, Envoy/Istio
AI focus
Develops AI security architecture and runtime defenses for foundation models, agentic frameworks, and MCP tool execution, addressing prompt injection, jailbreaks, and tool abuse.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative