below marketmost similar roles pay hereabove market
This role pays more than
89%
of similar roles. Most pay
$174,600–$251,037
— the blue band above.
At the midpoint, this role pays about
$307k
versus about
$213k
for comparable roles.
Based on 240 similar postings.
Employer
About Cisco
Cisco Systems is the world''s leading networking technology company, designing and manufacturing networking hardware, telecommunications equipment, and cybersecurity solutions for businesses and governments. Industry: Networking Technology & Cybersecurity
Cisco currently has
300 open roles
on FindRole.
Listed pay typically runs
$167,700–$245,200
across 231 roles with salary data.
The Principal Software Engineer, AI Defense joins the AI Defense team to secure enterprise AI platforms, autonomous agents, and foundation models. This role serves as the chief technical authority, architecting high-throughput control and data planes to protect against prompt injection, agent misuse, and data exfiltration. You will design and deploy microservices and APIs using Go, Python, or Java to process telemetry streams under strict latency SLAs. Key responsibilities include building runtime guardrails, Model Context Protocol policy enforcement, and automated remediation engines. You will utilize AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, and Kafka to manage multi-tenant cloud-native infrastructure. The work focuses on establishing zero-trust security boundaries and hardening agentic AI frameworks to neutralize adversarial attacks while translating complex AI safety research into production-ready software for global enterprise workflows.
What does a Software Engineer earn in California?
Median $214500 from 1156 postings across 72 companies.
Architect enterprise AI defense platforms including control planes, data planes, and policy engines.
Write and deploy high-throughput microservices and APIs using Go and Python.
Design runtime guardrails and automated remediation engines to neutralize prompt injection and model jailbreaks.
Implement Model Context Protocol (MCP) policy enforcement to secure tool execution.
Establish zero-trust security boundaries and architectures for enterprise AI ecosystems.
Translate complex AI safety research into production-hardened software and security standards.
Lead technical strategy by converting customer security requirements into production-ready software.
Mentor senior engineers and define engineering standards for AI defense.
What we're looking for
Bachelor’s degree in computer science with 15+ years of software engineering experience, Master’s with 12+ years, or Ph.D. with 8+ years.
8+ years of hands-on software development experience using Go, Python, or Java to build production microservices, SDKs, and REST/gRPC APIs.
Experience architecting and operating multi-tenant cloud-native infrastructure on AWS or GCP, including Kubernetes (EKS/GKE) and Kafka/MSK.
5+ years of core engineering experience in cybersecurity domains such as cloud security posture management, identity/access governance, or threat modeling.
Experience building, debugging, or securing LLM applications, agentic frameworks, or Model Context Protocol (MCP) architectures in production.
Expertise in AI safety engineering, including prompt-injection defenses, graph-based security models, and policy-as-code frameworks (preferred).
Experience leading greenfield 0-to-1 platform initiatives and executing zero-downtime migrations for high-throughput enterprise SaaS (preferred).
Experience implementing zero-trust network boundaries, secrets management, service meshes, and automated CI/CD DevSecOps pipelines (preferred).
Distributed Systems
AI Tools
cross platform development
Software Design
Debugging
Performance Analysis
Test Design
Scalable Services
Security
Operational Excellence
Distributed Systems
AWS
AI
LLM
CI/CD
GitOps
Event Streaming
Delta Lake
In-memory Data Grids
Rules Engine
Prompt Engineering
Model Observability
Platform Engineering