QA Engineer - Automation, Proxy, Networking | 8 - 12 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.

Own quality end to end for secure Agent Gateway services, from test strategy and automation through release validation and post-deployment verification. You will test application, proxy, network, container, and dependency boundaries, diagnose complex failures, and improve release confidence using strong networking, security, LLM, and MCP knowledge. Own risk-based quality planning, end-to-end coverage, automation strategy, exit criteria, deployment validation, release readiness, and communication of residual risk. Design and automate component, API, integration, end-to-end, performance, security, resilience, and production-readiness tests in GitHub and Jenkins pipelines. Validate control-plane and data-plane behavior under latency, concurrency, retries, timeouts, backpressure, dependency degradation, failover, recovery, capacity, and rollback. Test TCP, UDP, TLS/mTLS, DNS, routing, load balancing, policy enforcement, HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, HTTP/3, and QUIC using protocol-level and packet-level diagnostics. Validate MCP clients and servers, authentication, authorization, tool invocation, streaming, sessions, and safe agent workflows; drive cross-component defects through verified closure.

Bachelor's or master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience. 8 to 12 years of quality or software engineering experience, including end-to-end testing and automation ownership for distributed, networking, security, proxy, or cloud services. Hands-on Golang and/or Python test automation for APIs, services, and end-to-end workflows, including CI/CD integration and Linux or container diagnostics. Experience testing L4/L7 proxy behavior, TCP/IP, DNS, TLS/mTLS, HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, status codes, load balancing, packet analysis, and connection troubleshooting. Experience testing secure-access, ZTNA, SSE, or comparable products and validating OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML, tenant isolation, authorization, and policy enforcement.

Experience validating Envoy, H2O, xDS, custom filters, API gateways, service meshes, or comparable high-performance proxy platforms. Experience testing Kubernetes services and AWS deployments, including diagnostics, connectivity, scaling, deployment safety, and recovery. Experience with traffic generation, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, tracing, chaos testing, load testing, or production traffic analysis. Practical knowledge of LLM workflows and MCP clients, servers, tools, transports, authentication, authorization, and secure tool execution. Proactive ownership and cross-functional collaboration when driving ambiguous quality issues through verified end-to-end resolution. 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