Principal Engineer – Agentic AI for Network & Security Operations | 15+ years, Bangalore

Overview

Define and build the architecture for agentic AI and autonomous operations across Cisco's networking and security portfolio, providing technical direction across multiple engineering teams.

What you'll do

• Define the architecture for agentic AI platforms supporting network troubleshooting, operational assistance, incident analysis and dynamic visualization.
• Build tool-using AI agents that reason over network telemetry, configurations, events, alerts, logs and operational knowledge.
• Establish evaluation frameworks, guardrails, correctness standards and gateway services for safely deploying agents in production.
• Design real-time fault-detection, alerting, suppression, analysis and automated-remediation systems.
• Develop closed-loop operational workflows for proactive detection, guided investigation and safe remediation.
• Architect large-scale streaming and event-processing platforms capable of analyzing high-volume network and security telemetry.
• Create reusable platform services for search, scheduling, observability, data protection and operational integrations.
• Integrate network and security platforms with SIEM, IT service-management, collaboration and customer-notification systems.
• Design resilient, observable and cost-efficient cloud platforms using Kubernetes, microservices and distributed data technologies.
• Define multi-cloud architectures that operate consistently across AWS and GCP.
• Lead performance, scalability, reliability and cloud-cost optimization initiatives.
• Establish non-functional requirements and review architecture for services delivered across multiple teams.
• Partner with product and engineering leaders to translate emerging AI capabilities into customer outcomes.
• Mentor senior engineers and promote architecture, resiliency, observability and software-quality practices.

What you'll need

• 15+ years of experience in networking, security, platform engineering, distributed systems or related fields.
• Significant experience serving as a principal engineer, architect, founding engineer or equivalent senior technical leader.
• Strong expertise in enterprise network management, including wired or wireless infrastructure, device telemetry, configurations, fault management and operational automation.
• Experience designing production systems for network assurance, fault detection, alert processing or automated remediation.
• Hands-on experience building LLM-based or agentic systems for networking, security, operations or customer-support use cases.
• Experience with agent orchestration, tool-using agents, evaluation, guardrails and production correctness.
• Experience building high-volume streaming or event-driven platforms using technologies such as Kafka, Flink, Kinesis or equivalent systems.
• Strong knowledge of distributed data and search technologies such as OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, Hudi, RocksDB, Redis, DynamoDB or relational databases.
• Experience designing cloud-native platforms using Kubernetes, Docker, microservices and asynchronous messaging.
• Experience with AWS, GCP or comparable public-cloud platforms.
• Strong programming ability in Java and/or Python.
• Working knowledge of network and security protocols such as TCP/IP, HTTP, TLS, SNMP, SMTP, ICAP or related technologies.
• Experience with observability platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Loki or comparable systems.
• Proven ability to define technical direction, review designs and deliver production systems across multiple engineering teams.

Nice to have

• Experience applying agentic AI to network operations, security operations or autonomous infrastructure.
• Experience with LangGraph or comparable agent-orchestration frameworks.
• Knowledge of retrieval, grounding, agent evaluation and operational safety techniques for enterprise AI systems.
• Experience with Network-as-a-Service, Zero Trust, CASB, DLP, network assurance or cloud-security platforms.
• Experience building rule-based or intelligent anomaly- and fault-detection systems at large scale.
• Experience implementing closed-loop detection, investigation and remediation.
• Experience integrating operational platforms with SIEM and ITSM systems such as Splunk, ServiceNow or equivalent products.
• Experience architecting multi-tenant security proxies, policy-enforcement systems or cloud data-protection services.
• Demonstrated success improving platform performance, reliability and cloud cost.
• Experience leading platform migrations across data centers and public clouds.
• Strong product mindset with a record of connecting technical innovation to measurable customer and business outcomes.
• Granted patents, publications or demonstrated technical innovation in networking, security, AI or distributed systems.
• Experience mentoring engineers and influencing technical execution without direct organizational authority.

Details

• Location: Bangalore, India.