Staff Software Engineer - AI/Security Platform

Job description

The application window is expected to close on: 09/24/2026 Meet the Team We are an agile team with a startup feel and a strong bias for action. We move fast, embrace failure as part of the process, and stay focused on solving real-world problems for defenders on the front lines. Our team blends deep expertise in AI, cybersecurity, platform and systems engineering. We are driven by a shared belief that the only way to outpace hackers is through AI advancements that free up humans to tackle real threats and more challenging problems. This is a place for builders who thrive in ambiguity, challenge the status quo, and care deeply about making a meaningful impact. If you’re energized by tough problems, excited to shape the future of cyber defense, and eager to work alongside passionate experts, you’ll feel right at home. Your Impact • Design and build systems that combine security-relevant data, detection signals, context, and foundation models to spot and predict threats, those in action and those that are about to happen.Prototype and test new AI features - from decoding events and system environments to predicting anomalies and threats - working closely with security SMEs and security researchers to validate real-world utility.Develop an AI DevOps pipeline to enable rapid experimentation with data. Knowledge bases, models, and context memory, using clear, measurable success criteria to evaluate iterations.Architect and build the distributed platform that can correlate trillions of events & signals, and can synthesize them into explainable findings and alerts, consumed by our triage resolution agents – you will be building a key capability of the Agentic SOC.Collaborate with product and platform teams to co-design AI-enhanced threat detection and prediction workflows that are intuitive, scalable, and immediately useful to analysts.Contribute to the core architecture powering AI-native security operations, helping to shape how Splunk and Cisco scale trusted automation across the enterprise.Minimum Qualifications • Bachelor's Degree with 8+ years of related experience or Master's with 6+ years of related experience. Engineering Qualifications: • Distributed Systems design and implementation - Experience with an emphasis on storage systems and storage access layersData Platform/Fabric - Experience implementing data platforms and/or data lakes and warehouses.Proficient Python Development - Experience building scalable backend services, APIs, and automation workflows in Python.DevOps/SecOps Practices - Experience, proficient with CI/CD pipelines, version control (GitHub/GitLab), Jira, and automated testing frameworks.Agentic development – Experience designing agent systems that will perform coding tasks for you.Cross-Functional Collaboration – Experience partnering with product managers, security SMEs, and engineers to iterate quickly and deliver impactful solutions.Security Qualifications: • Security Telemetry Fluency – Experience working with common telemetry data sources such as endpoint logs, network traffic, authentication events, or cloud audit trails and understanding how they’re used in detection and investigation workflows.Preferred Qualifications • Security Data Engineering – Experience building and maintaining pipelines for ingesting, parsing, and normalizing large-scale security telemetry. • Enterprise-grade Security Product Experience – Familiarity with TDIR/SIEM architectures, correlation searches, threat hunting support systems. Bonus if you’ve worked with Splunk’s APIs, internals, or have experience developing on the Splunk platform. • Security Operations Experience – Understanding of security operations concepts, including attack surface management, threat analytics, detection, triage, investigation, and response. Alternatively, f ormer Tier 3 SOC analyst or equivalent, with experience automating SecOps workflows and building scalable, resilient detection infrastructure. • Data Encoding & Embeddings – Exposure to event storage systems or generating custom embeddings for domain-specific tasks in cybersecurity. • RAG and GraphRAG Search Implementation – Hands-on experience developing retrieval-augmented generation pipelines and working with databases (e.g., FAISS, Pinecone). • Model Integration – Skilled in crafting, testing, and optimizing training workloads for large language or special-purpose models such as GNNs, GCNs, GATs. Ideally, you have contributed to or shipped an AI-powered feature or product and understand the nuances of integrating models into real-world workflows - including usability, performance, and trust considerations. • AI Evaluation & Experimentation – Capable of designing experiments to evaluate model output for accuracy, usability, performance, and cost • UX and Human Factors for Analysts – Background or interest in designing intuitive, AI-assisted analyst workflows with a focus on usability, trust, and decision support. 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 $186,900.00 to $267,700.00 and reflects the projected salary range for new hires in this p