Sr Software Engineer, Security Core AI – Agentic SOC (hybrid)

Job posting may be removed earlier if the position is filled or if a sufficient number of applications are received.

This is a Hybrid role requiring limited on-site work at a Cisco office in the Pacific Time Zone, preferably our San Jose, San Francisco, CA, or Seattle WA offices.
Help build the Agentic SOC of the future at Cisco Security! 

You will work at the intersection of cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and large-scale distributed systems to create trusted agentic capabilities that help security teams detect, investigate, and respond to threats more effectively. As part of the Security Core AI team, you will build and improve the shared AI systems behind these experiences—from agent platforms, orchestration, and governed tool use to evaluation, production trace analysis, and continuous quality improvement.

You will help deliver secure, reliable AI capabilities across cloud, on-premises, sovereign cloud, and air-gapped environments; collaborate with engineering teams across Cisco and Splunk; and apply AI tools throughout the software development lifecycle. This is an opportunity to turn rapidly evolving AI technologies into production-grade capabilities that operate at the scale, complexity, and trust level required by Cisco Security customers.

• Work independently on complex, ambiguous problems and serve as a technical resource within the team and partner teams.

• Design and deliver complex components across shared Security AI runtime, orchestration, evaluation, and applied quality.

• Own substantial features from requirements and design through implementation, testing, integration, deployment, and continuous improvement.

• Contribute to architecture and technical direction, using prototypes, evaluations, telemetry, and production evidence to guide decisions.

• Build reusable capabilities such as agent execution, governed tool use, context and memory, shared APIs, telemetry, evaluation frameworks, trace analysis, and experimentation systems.

• Apply familiarity with SOC, SIEM, detections, incidents, investigations, and response to engineer useful AI systems with domain SMEs.

• Develop agents and supporting systems for grounded reasoning, planning, delegation, human oversight, traceability, and safe failure handling.

• Use golden datasets, offline and online evaluations, production traces, trajectory analysis, regression gates, and model, prompt, or tool experiments to improve AI behavior.

• Design for cloud, on-premises, sovereign cloud, and air-gapped environments, addressing data residency, restricted connectivity, local model and tool availability, resource constraints, packaging, and upgrades.

• Implement identity propagation, authorization, tenant isolation, policy enforcement, privacy, audit-ability, and permission-aware actions.

• Integrate and promote adoption of shared Cisco and Splunk technologies, contributing Security requirements, feedback, and reusable improvements.

• Use shared contracts, adapters, and configuration to support product and deployment differences without unnecessary duplication.

• Leverage AI tools across requirements, design, coding, review, testing, documentation, debugging, release, and production analysis, with human validation and appropriate security, privacy, and intellectual-property controls.

• Make sound trade-offs across AI quality, latency, performance, cost, reliability, security, operability, and delivery.

• Diagnose failures across models, prompts, tools, data, orchestration, services, infrastructure, and product integrations.

• Write functional, maintainable, secure code and contributes to architecture, testing, review, and technical documentation standards.

• Collaborate across product, domain, deployment, quality, release, and support teams to land capabilities end to end.

• Mentor engineers, shares technical expertise, and improves engineering practices and knowledge sharing.

• 5+ years of experience developing, testing, and/or operating production software.

• Experience in software engineering in production, developing with Python or Golang

• Experience developing and operating production AI, agentic, or distributed systems, including one or more of agent runtime, orchestration, shared APIs, context and memory, evaluation frameworks, experimentation systems, or production tracing. 

• Demonstrated ability to design, implement, debug, and maintain complex, production-grade system

• Experience with LLM and agentic-system concepts such as grounding and retrieval, planning, delegation, tool use, human oversight, behavioral evaluation, and regression analysis.

• Experience delivering containerized or cloud-native software across public cloud, on-premises, sovereign cloud, or air-gapped environments, including restricted connectivity and disconnected installation or upgrades.

• Familiarity with SOC, SIEM, detections, incidents, investigations, and response, along with security concepts such as identity, authorization, policy, privacy, tenancy, and audit-ability.

• Experience evaluating, integrating, or adopting shared technologies across large organizations; experience with Cisco, Splunk, or comparable security, data, and AI platforms is preferred.

• Proven responsible use of AI-assisted engineering throughout the software development lifecycle, with sound judgment around validation, code quality, security, privacy, intellectual property, and human accountability.

At Cisco, we’re revolutionizing how data and infrastructure connect and protect organizations in the AI era – and beyond. We’ve been innovating fearlessly for 40 years to create solutions that power how humans and technology work together across the physical and digital worlds. These solutions provide customers with unparalleled security, visibility, and insights across the entire digital footprint.

Fueled by the depth and breadth of our technology, we experiment and create meaningful solutions. Add to that our worldwide network of doers and experts, and you’ll see that the opportunities to grow and build are limitless. We work as a team, collaborating with empathy to make really big things happen on a global scale. Because our solutions are everywhere, our impact is everywhere. 

We are Cisco, and our power starts with you. 

Individual pay is determined by the candidate's hiring location, market conditions, job-related skillset, experience, qualifications, education, certifications, and/or training. The full salary range for certain locations is listed below. For locations not listed below, the recruiter can share more details about compensation for the role in your location during the hiring process.

U.S. employees are offered benefits, subject to Cisco’s plan eligibility rules, which include medical, dental and vision insurance, a 401(k) plan with a Cisco matching contribution, paid parental leave, short and long-term disability coverage, and basic life insurance. Please see the Cisco careers site to discover more benefits and perks.  Employees may be eligible to receive grants of Cisco restricted stock units, which vest following continued employment with Cisco for defined periods of time.

U.S. employees are eligible for paid time away as described below, subject to Cisco’s policies:

• 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 determined by Cisco

• Non-exempt employees** receive 16 days of paid vacation time per full calendar year, accrued at rate of 4.92 hours per pay period for full-time employees

• Exempt employees participate in Cisco’s flexible vacation time off program, which has no defined limit on how much vacation time eligible employees may use (subject to availability and some business limitations)

• 80 hours of sick time off provided on hire date and each January 1st thereafter, and up to 80 hours of unused sick time carried forward from one calendar year to the next

• Additional paid time away may be requested to deal with critical or emergency issues for family members

• Optional 10 paid days per full calendar year to volunteer

For non-sales roles, employees are also eligible to earn annual bonuses subject to Cisco’s policies.

Employees on sales plans earn performance-based incentive pay on top of their base salary, which is split between quota and non-quota components, subject to the applicable Cisco plan. For quota-based incentive pay, Cisco typically pays as follows:

• .75% of incentive target for each 1% of revenue attainment up to 50% of quota;

• 1.5% of incentive target for each 1% of attainment between 50% and 75%;

• 1% of incentive target for each 1% of attainment between 75% and 100%; and

• Once performance exceeds 100% attainment, incentive rates are at or above 1% for each 1% of attainment with no cap on incentive compensation.

For non-quota-based sales performance elements such as strategic sales objectives, Cisco may pay 0% up to 125% of target. Cisco sales plans do not have a minimum threshold of performance for sales incentive compensation to be paid.

The applicable full salary ranges for this position, by specific state, are listed below:

New York City Metro Area:

Non-Metro New York state & Washington state:

* For quota-based sales roles on Cisco’s sales plan, the ranges provided in this posting include base pay and sales target incentive compensation combined.

** Employees in Illinois, whether exempt or non-exempt, will participate in a unique time off program to meet local requirements.