Principal Software Engineer

Principal Engineer – Data Security & Cloud Protection

Meet The Team

Cisco Security Business Group (SBG) is at the forefront of developing solutions for addressing the security challenges of our customers. With an annual revenue exceeding $2B, it is one of the fastest growing businesses at Cisco. As Cisco is transforming its business model aggressively to a software and recurring revenue model, security business is leading this journey with 40%+ YoY growth in software recurring revenue. 

The Cloud Security group within SBG focuses on developing cloud delivered security solutions (SaaS based) in a platform centric approach. This group is an autonomous group within the business group, and operates like a Startup to nurture innovation in a highly disruptive and high growth domain. This group was formed a year back by combining some of existing cloud assets Cisco had with two hugely successful acquisitions - OpenDNS and CloudLock. Our vision is to build the most complex security solutions in a cloud delivered way with utmost simplicity - disrupt industry's thinking around how deep and how broad a security solution can be while keeping it easy to deploy and simple to manage. We are at an exciting stage of this journey with 100% YoY growth, and looking for a passionate, innovative and action-oriented engineering leader for our Product Engineering group to help us scale our business.  

Why is cloud security relevant? Because today's world has changed. The way we work has fundamentally changed. There is more roaming users than ever with rapid growth of BYOD. Business applications have moved to cloud. Enterprise's critical infrastructure has been moving to public/private cloud. At the same time, threat landscape has drastically changed with increased sophistication of attacks. The notion of traditional perimeter-based security is being disrupted. Since users, apps and infrastructure have all moved to cloud, security must too. Welcome to the team of geeks passionate about solving this very problem and making world a better place…a secure place. 

We have a highly scalable cloud infrastructure spread across 25 data centers where we run our cloud security applications that operate at massive scale - 100B+ requests per day from 65M daily active users. 

Your Impact

As a Principal Engineer, you will shape the technical direction of Cisco Secure Access at the intersection of AI, application intelligence, SaaS security, and cloud-scale architecture. You will define the architecture and roadmap for core CASB and Application Visibility and Control (AVC) capabilities that help enterprises gain deeper visibility, enforce granular application policies, and protect data across today’s SaaS and AI-driven environments.

You will lead the transformation of application discovery and classification through AI-assisted intelligence, improving automation, accuracy, data freshness, and the speed at which new applications and threats can be identified. You will also help embed responsible AI across the product development lifecycle, using AI to accelerate engineering productivity, quality, testing, troubleshooting, and delivery.

What You Will Do

The Principal Engineer will lead the architecture and technical direction for Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) and Application Visibility and Control (AVC) capabilities within Cisco Secure Access.

• Define the architecture and roadmap for application discovery, granular application controls, SaaS tenant controls, and offline or API-based DLP and malware scanning of SaaS content.

• Lead the broader use of AI in the product, including AI-powered security capabilities, controls for generative AI applications, and responsible use of AI across the product development lifecycle.

• Own the technical strategy for the internal CASI application-intelligence platform, including data quality, confidence scoring, human validation, model monitoring, update speed, and scaling with traffic and application growth. Lead the AI-assisted transformation of application discovery and classification.

• Guide critical feature designs and establish foundations for security, privacy, performance, scalability, resilience, observability, quality, troubleshooting, and cost efficiency.

• Translate customer needs, emerging threats, and product priorities into scalable capabilities in partnership with product management, security research, architects, and engineering teams.

• Provide cross-team technical leadership and mentorship, resolve complex architectural issues, and raise engineering standards without becoming a design-review bottleneck.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Typically, 12+ years of software engineering experience, including architecture and technical leadership across multiple teams.
• Direct experience with CASB, AVC, SSE/SASE, Secure Web Gateway, DLP, malware protection, or SaaS tenant security.
• Experience building application-discovery, traffic-classification, application-intelligence, or high-volume telemetry systems.
• Demonstrated experience designing and operating large-scale, cloud-native distributed systems.
• Experience architecting or integrating AI or machine-learning capabilities into production products or engineering workflows.
• Strong background in cloud-delivered web, SaaS, network, or data security, with understanding of policy enforcement and data protection.
• Proven ability to remain hands-on while influencing senior stakeholders, guiding complex designs, and mentoring experienced engineers.

Preferred Qualifications

• Master's degree or PhD in Computer Science, Cybersecurity, Machine Learning, or a related field.
• Experience with AI-based classification, human-in-the-loop workflows, model evaluation, monitoring, and MLOps.
• Experience architecting global, multi-tenant services on AWS and resolving complex production or customer issues.

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

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• be in direct response to an application you have submitted through the company career site
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