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

About the role

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.

Your Impact

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.

Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience developing, testing, and/or operating production software.
• Experience in software engineering in production, developing with Python or Golang.

Preferred Qualifications

• 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 systems.
• 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.

Pay

The starting salary range for this position is $167,700.00 to $245,200.00 in U.S. and/or Canada locations, not including incentive compensation, equity, or benefits. Individual pay is determined by hiring location, market conditions, job-related skillset, experience, qualifications, education, certifications, and/or training.

Full salary ranges by specific location:

• New York City Metro Area: $167,700.00 – $282,000.00
• Non-Metro New York State & Washington State: $149,100.00 – $250,900.00

Employees may be eligible to receive grants of Cisco restricted stock units, which vest following continued employment for defined periods of time. For non-sales roles, employees are also eligible to earn annual bonuses subject to Cisco's policies.

Schedule

This is a Hybrid role requiring limited on-site work at a Cisco office in the Pacific Time Zone, preferably San Jose, San Francisco, CA, or Seattle, WA offices.

Benefits

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
• Basic life insurance
• 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
• 4 paid days off for personal wellness determined by Cisco
• Non-exempt employees: 16 days of paid vacation time per full calendar year, accrued at 4.92 hours per pay period for full-time employees
• Exempt employees: flexible vacation time off program with no defined limit (subject to availability and business limitations)
• 80 hours of sick time off provided on hire date and each January 1st thereafter, with up to 80 hours of unused sick time carried forward year to year
• Additional paid time away may be requested for critical or emergency family issues
• Optional 10 paid days per full calendar year to volunteer