Senior Staff Software Engineer

Meet The Team Cisco is shaping the future of AI-powered quality for Enterprise Security and modern Security Operations Center workflows. Our team is focused on building scalable quality foundations, advanced test automation, evaluation frameworks, and performance validation for complex AI-driven security products. We partner closely with Engineering, Product, Security, and Quality teams to improve reliability, scalability, security, and customer trust across mission-critical platforms.

As a Senior Staff Software Engineer, you will define and drive the technical strategy for AI-powered quality, agentic workflow validation, benchmarking, and automation frameworks. You will lead complex technical initiatives, mentor senior engineers, and help establish quality practices that scale across teams and products.

Define the architecture and roadmap for Product Quality foundations, test automation, and AI-agent evaluation frameworks. Lead validation strategies for AI agents, complex SOC workflows, tenant isolation, audit logs, and system behavior. Identify gaps in current testing methods and build AI-based automation solutions to improve quality, coverage, and efficiency. Establish benchmarking, performance testing, and regression frameworks for scalable and reliable product validation. Mentor engineers, review technical designs, and guide teams through complex quality and automation challenges. Lead proof-of-concepts and define clear success criteria for new testing approaches and AI-assisted automation. Partner with Engineering and Product leaders to embed quality earlier in the development lifecycle. Drive standards for contract testing, compliance validation, performance testing, and behavioral regression. Ensure testing processes deliver reliable, repeatable, and high-quality outcomes at enterprise scale.

Bachelor's degree with 12+ years of experience in software development, quality engineering, or test automation. 5+ years of experience architecting large-scale test automation platforms or quality engineering ecosystems. 5+ years software development experience in Python and playwright. 5+ years experience designing scalable, maintainable, and high-performance test infrastructure. 1+ years experience using AI-assisted tools or AI agents to build and scale test automation.

Strong technical leadership skills with the ability to turn ambiguous quality challenges into clear technical strategy. Experience with AI/ML testing, LLM APIs, prompt engineering, agentic workflows, and LLM-as-judge evaluation. Experience with Claude, Codex, or similar AI development and evaluation tools. Experience with performance tools such as JMeter, or similar test environments. Strong ability to collaborate across Engineering, Product, Security, Compliance, and Quality teams. Passion for mentoring engineers and building a culture of automation, accountability, and customer-focused quality. 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