Software Engineering Technical Leader

About this role

The application window is expected to close on: 10/29/2026 Job posting may be removed earlier if the position is filled or if a sufficient number of applications are received .

Meet the Team Cisco’s Customer Experience (CX) engineering organization is a global team of experts dedicated to delivering world-class digital experiences by building advanced AI applications and capabilities through an industry leading platform centric approach with Cisco IQ. These capabilities provide high value directly to our customers and partners and empower our internal teams to deliver superior, data-driven services. We pride ourselves on a culture that thrives on customer-centricity and technical rigor, solving complex challenges leveraging AI/ML solutions.

Your Impact As a Software Engineering Technical Leader in Cisco’s CX Engineering organization, you will serve as the principal technical authority driving the next generation of enterprise AI and cloud-native platforms. Scaling beyond team-level execution, you will define multi-year roadmaps, bridge complex business goals with high-throughput architectures, and elevate engineering excellence by mentoring technical leaders across the organization. • Strategic Architectural Vision: Lead the end-to-end design and system topology for multi-tenant cloud platforms, evaluating emerging technologies to drive governance across microservices and hybrid data environments. • Enterprise AI & Autonomous Systems: Architect foundational AI applications, including distributed Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), agentic workflows, multi-modal LLM orchestrations, and secure vector retrieval systems. • High-Scale Distributed Systems: Design fault-tolerant, elastic systems by establishing company-wide standards for concurrency control, high-throughput messaging (Apache Kafka), caching, and multi-region data persistence. • Security, Compliance & Resilience: Enforce zero-trust integration patterns and data protection standards (HashiCorp Vault, OAuth2/OIDC) while ensuring compliance with enterprise Service Level Objectives (SLOs). • Technical Governance & Engineering Standards: Conduct global architecture review boards (ARBs) and champion best practices across API contracts (gRPC/REST), Kubernetes orchestration, CI/CD, and observability. • Leadership & Organizational Influence: Mentor Lead Software Engineers and drive technical consensus across matrixed pods, aligning disparate technology stacks toward unified enterprise goals. • Executive Alignment: Partner with product and engineering executives to translate long-term business strategy into actionable execution blueprints.

Minimum Qualifications • Bachelor’s with 8+ years of related experience or Master’s with 6+ years of related experience. • 4+ years’ experience in software development as a Technical Lead or similar lead role across large scale systems. • Python experience building production grade microservices and event driven architectures. • Technical experience in cloud-native ecosystems (such as AWS, GCP, or Azure), container orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker), and automated CI/CD infrastructures. • Experience designing high-concurrency, distributed data pipelines and messaging systems (e.g., Apache Kafka, Redis, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB/Cassandra). • Background in API contract design (gRPC, REST, GraphQL) and systemic domain-driven design (DDD).

Preferred Qualifications • Strategic Product Vision: Demonstrated success in shaping overarching backend product strategies and data architectures, including evaluating and implementing pioneering capabilities (example – AI driven pipelines) to influence multi-year business roadmaps. • AI/ML Platform Architecture: Demonstrated history architecting scalable MLOps, LLM integration frameworks, agentic AI platforms, fine-tuning infrastructure, or large-scale hybrid/vector search engine integrations (e.g., Pinecone, Qdrant). • Operational Excellence: Experience establishing observability platforms (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana), chaos engineering protocols, and formal site reliability engineering (SRE) frameworks. • Industry & Strategic Influence: Active involvement in driving open-source contributions, technology patents, enterprise architecture standards, or speaking at industry conferences. • Soft Skills: Demonstrated ability to navigate ambiguity, drive technical consensus, and communicate complex architectural concepts to divers stakeholders.

Why Cisco?  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. 

Message to applicants applying to work in the U.S. and/or Canada:

The starting salary range posted for this position is $151,600.00 to $222,400.00 and reflects the projected salary range for new hires in this position in U.S. and/or Canada locations, not including incentive compensation*, equity, or benefits. 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

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