Software Engineering Technical Leader - Proxy, Networking + Cloud Security | 12 to 16 yrs

Meet the Team 

Join the Cisco Secure Access team building the Cisco AI Agent Gateway, a distributed, highly available platform that enables AI agents to securely connect to MCP servers, LLM providers, and enterprise tool APIs. We combine distributed systems, network security, proxy, cloud, and AI expertise to deliver identity-aware access, policy enforcement, observability, and auditability at scale.

Your Impact 

As a Software Engineering Technical Leader, you will set technical direction and own the Agent Gateway end to end, from ideation and architecture through Golang development, cloud deployment, production operations, and customer support. You will lead a team, solve complex distributed-system and networking problems, and deliver secure, highly available services.

• Set technical direction, lead architecture and design reviews, mentor engineers, establish standards, and remain hands-on through implementation and production resolution.

• Design resilient control-plane and data-plane services with clear failure handling, scalability, consistency boundaries, capacity planning, and safe regional failover.

• Lead Envoy/H2O proxy and networking design across L4/L7 routing, DNS, TLS/mTLS, HTTP, HTTP/2, gRPC, load balancing, service discovery, and policy enforcement.

• Own delivery from requirements through validation, cloud deployment, support, and continuous improvement, including SLOs, observability, incidents, rollback, capacity, and disaster recovery.

• Guide secure AI-agent integration with MCP servers, LLM providers, and enterprise tool APIs, including identity, authorization, credential isolation, tenant boundaries, auditability, streaming, and tool execution.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor's or master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

• 12 or more years of software engineering experience, including at least 4 years leading an engineering team or providing technical leadership for production services.

• Hands-on Golang development and system-design experience for scalable distributed services, including concurrency, APIs, retries, timeouts, backpressure, idempotency, caching, and failure recovery.

• Hands-on experience with Envoy, H2O, or comparable proxies and L4/L7 networking, including TCP/IP, DNS, TLS/mTLS, HTTP, HTTP/2, gRPC, load balancing, and troubleshooting.

• Production ownership experience across Linux, containers, AWS/Azure/GCP, observability, on-call response, incident management, customer support, safe deployments, rollback, and disaster recovery.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience building network-security products using Envoy xDS, custom filters, H2O, API gateways, service meshes, or comparable high-performance proxies.

• Practical knowledge of LLM applications and MCP clients, servers, tools, resources, prompts, transports, streaming, authentication, authorization, and secure tool execution.

• Experience with Kubernetes, infrastructure automation, CI/CD, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, distributed tracing, load testing, and production traffic analysis.

• Familiarity with OAuth/OIDC, workload identity, secrets management, agent frameworks, LLM provider APIs, software supply-chain security, and agent-specific threats.

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
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• be conducted across email, phone, or WebEx

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