Principal Software Engineer

Principal Software Engineer - GO, Python, Microservices, Large Scale Cloud Platforms, Data & Systems

Meet the team

The Ciscos AI team consists of AI researchers, and software developers who collaborate to build innovative products and platforms for Cisco. We are motivated by tackling unique challenges that arise when connecting people and devices at a world-wide scale.

You will join a newly formed, dynamic AI team as one of the core members, and have the opportunity to influence the culture and direction of the growing team. Our team includes AI experts and distributed system experts who work together with our partners in products management, and engineers across a wide variety of other Cisco teams.

Your Impact

We are seeking a Principal Engineer to join our Platform team, where you will play a vital role in integrating non-AI service, AI services for our Cisco Cloud Control products. Your skills in understanding service operations and architecting/building effective interfaces between service boundaries with the right instrumentation will be essential for the success of our product. Your role will involve understanding the operations of disparate product services, AI services, non-AI services, designing and building interfaces that seamlessly connect these services, and ensuring the appropriate instrumentation is in place. Your work will be instrumental in delivering a powerful and effective solution to our customers.

• Provide technical leadership to all members of the team to guide designs and implementations towards optimal results with regard to reusability, security, reliability, and performance.
• Collaborate with various stakeholders to design complex systems comprised of multiple ML and non-ML services which meet the highest levels of security, performance, reliability, and scalability while satisfying requirements from within our own team plus those of external integrating teams.
• Collaborate with disparate teams to understand the operations of core services, AI services and integrate them into our Cisco wide platform.
• Design and build effective interfaces between AI services, ensuring smooth communication and data exchange while adhering to security and performance requirements.
• Implement the right types of instrumentation to monitor and measure the performance, reliability, and security of integrated AI services.
• Debug integration issues, identifying bottlenecks or errors and implementing solutions to optimize service interactions.
• Work on performance tuning and optimization of the integrated AI services to ensure efficient and responsive operation.
• Develop clear and comprehensive documentation for integration processes, interfaces, and instrumentation, facilitating teamwork and knowledge transfer within the team.
• Collaborate closely with AI engineers, data scientists, and security experts to ensure smooth integration of AI services into the products.
• Ensure that integrated AI services meet security and compliance standards, working closely with the security team to implement necessary measures.

Minimum Qualifications

• 12+ years experience as a Backend Engineer with expertise in integrating complex services.
• 8+ years experience writing code in Python, Java, or Go.
• 5+ years experience building a large-scale cloud product platform.
• Must have experience managing large datasets and high transaction throughput systems.
• BA / BS degree with 10+ years of experience (or) MS degree with 8+ years of experience as a software development engineer

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in AI service operations, including Generative AI, and the ability to design and build interfaces between them.
• Understanding of GenAI frameworks and orchestrators like LangChain, Llamalndex, Semantic Kernel or AutoGen.
• Strong experience building a 200+ microservices platform, distributed computing, complex data structures and algorithms.
• Production experience handling 10+ PB datasets; experience with complex join and graph-like queries
• Experience with instrumentation and monitoring tools for measuring service performance.
• Experience with presenting to executive audiences and driving architecture/design across large group of senior engineers.
• Knowledge of compliance standards.