Principal Engineer – Agentic AI for Network & Security Operations
Meet the Team
The Cisco CTO Organization is shaping the future of networking and security through AI-native, cloud-delivered and autonomous operations platforms. We are building intelligent systems that make network and security operations more observable, proactive, reliable and efficient at enterprise scale.
Your Impact
As a Principal Engineer, you will define and build the architecture for agentic AI and autonomous operations across Cisco’s networking and security portfolio.
You will combine deep experience in network management, security platforms, distributed systems, cloud-native architecture and large-scale telemetry with emerging agentic AI technologies. Your work will help operators diagnose problems faster, understand complex operational conditions and safely automate remediation.
You will provide technical direction across multiple engineering teams and turn new AI capabilities into scalable, reliable and customer-facing products.
What You’ll Do
- Define the architecture for agentic AI platforms supporting network troubleshooting, operational assistance, incident analysis and dynamic visualization.
- Build tool-using AI agents that reason over network telemetry, configurations, events, alerts, logs and operational knowledge.
- Establish evaluation frameworks, guardrails, correctness standards and gateway services for safely deploying agents in production.
- Design real-time fault-detection, alerting, suppression, analysis and automated-remediation systems.
- Develop closed-loop operational workflows for proactive detection, guided investigation and safe remediation.
- Architect large-scale streaming and event-processing platforms capable of analyzing high-volume network and security telemetry.
- Create reusable platform services for search, scheduling, observability, data protection and operational integrations.
- Integrate network and security platforms with SIEM, IT service-management, collaboration and customer-notification systems.
- Design resilient, observable and cost-efficient cloud platforms using Kubernetes, microservices and distributed data technologies.
- Define multi-cloud architectures that operate consistently across AWS and GCP.
- Lead performance, scalability, reliability and cloud-cost optimization initiatives.
- Establish non-functional requirements and review architecture for services delivered across multiple teams.
- Partner with product and engineering leaders to translate emerging AI capabilities into customer outcomes.
- Mentor senior engineers and promote architecture, resiliency, observability and software-quality practices.
Success in This Role
Successful candidates will demonstrate the ability to:
- Turn complex operational problems into scalable platform capabilities.
- Balance rapid AI innovation with correctness, safety, reliability and observability.
- Operate across AI, networking, security and cloud-platform boundaries.
- Lead through architecture, technical influence and hands-on contribution.
- Deliver measurable improvements in operational efficiency, customer experience, platform cost and system reliability.
Minimum Qualifications
- 15+ years of experience in networking, security, platform engineering, distributed systems or related fields.
- Significant experience serving as a principal engineer, architect, founding engineer or equivalent senior technical leader.
- Strong expertise in enterprise network management, including wired or wireless infrastructure, device telemetry, configurations, fault management and operational automation.
- Experience designing production systems for network assurance, fault detection, alert processing or automated remediation.
- Hands-on experience building LLM-based or agentic systems for networking, security, operations or customer-support use cases.
- Experience with agent orchestration, tool-using agents, evaluation, guardrails and production correctness.
- Experience building high-volume streaming or event-driven platforms using technologies such as Kafka, Flink, Kinesis or equivalent systems.
- Strong knowledge of distributed data and search technologies such as OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, Hudi, RocksDB, Redis, DynamoDB or relational databases.
- Experience designing cloud-native platforms using Kubernetes, Docker, microservices and asynchronous messaging.
- Experience with AWS, GCP or comparable public-cloud platforms.
- Strong programming ability in Java and/or Python.
- Working knowledge of network and security protocols such as TCP/IP, HTTP, TLS, SNMP, SMTP, ICAP or related technologies.
- Experience with observability platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Loki or comparable systems.
- Proven ability to define technical direction, review designs and deliver production systems across multiple engineering teams.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience applying agentic AI to network operations, security operations or autonomous infrastructure.
- Experience with LangGraph or comparable agent-orchestration frameworks.
- Knowledge of retrieval, grounding, agent evaluation and operational safety techniques for enterprise AI systems.
- Experience with Network-as-a-Service, Zero Trust, CASB, DLP, network assurance or cloud-security platforms.
- Experience building rule-based or intelligent anomaly- and fault-detection systems at large scale.
- Experience implementing closed-loop detection, investigation and remediation.
- Experience integrating operational platforms with SIEM and ITSM systems such as Splunk, ServiceNow or equivalent products.
- Experience architecting multi-tenant security proxies, policy-enforcement systems or cloud data-protection services.
- Demonstrated success improving platform performance, reliability and cloud cost.
- Experience leading platform migrations across data centers and public clouds.
- Strong product mindset with a record of connecting technical innovation to measurable customer and business outcomes.
- Granted patents, publications or demonstrated technical innovation in networking, security, AI or distributed systems.
- Experience mentoring engineers and influencing technical execution without direct organizational authority.
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.
Disclaimer
To ensure that we hire the best talent in the right way, we follow a strict hiring process and recently, Cisco has been made aware of fraudulent recruiters claiming to be from the company. Please be advised that any communication from Cisco about careers will:
- be in direct response to an application you have submitted through the company career site
- begin with screening or an interview
- originate from a Cisco email address, and
- be conducted across email, phone, or WebEx
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If you are the target of a recruiting scam, consider filing a report with your local law enforcement authorities. Cisco bears no responsibility, and cannot be held liable, for any claims, damages, expenses, or other inconvenience resulting from or in any way connected to recruiting scams.
