About the role
Meet the Team Technical Leader, Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense (ETD) — G11 | Bangalore, India. Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense builds cloud security systems that help organizations detect, investigate, and respond to email threats. In this role, you will set technical direction for applied AI across the product, turning machine learning, generative AI, and agentic workflows into secure, reliable capabilities with measurable customer value. You will lead complex engineering work from exploration and evaluation through production, and raise AI and software engineering capability across the team. Your Impact You will combine deep AI expertise with strong software and security engineering judgment. You will guide the team in selecting the right problems for AI, validating solutions against rigorous quality and safety standards, and operating them effectively at cloud scale. · Set the technical strategy and architecture for applied AI in ETD, connecting customer problems and product goals to a clear engineering roadmap. · Design and lead AI capabilities for email threat investigation, triage, verdict quality, analyst assistance, and safe remediation using machine learning, large language models, and agent workflows where they fit. · Own the AI lifecycle from data and use-case assessment through model or agent selection, prototyping, evaluation, production launch, monitoring, and continuous improvement. · Build evaluation approaches that test accuracy, precision and recall, false-positive impact, robustness, latency, cost, and consistency across representative threat and customer scenarios. · Establish safeguards for privacy, data protection, prompt and tool security, access control, auditability, human oversight, and responsible AI use. · Architect scalable cloud services, APIs, data pipelines, and product integrations that make AI capabilities reliable and maintainable in production. · Lead the safe adoption of approved AI coding assistants and agentic engineering workflows, with strong review, testing, security, and accountability for generated output. · Partner with product management, threat research, engineering, customer experience, and support to shape requirements and turn customer and operational evidence into improvements. · Lead resolution of complex customer-impacting issues and ensure production readiness through observability, incident response, root-cause analysis, and operational follow-through. · Raise software quality through design and code reviews, automated testing, CI/CD, threat modeling, and engineering practices that improve reliability and delivery speed. · Measure the impact of AI and engineering investments using customer outcomes, telemetry, adoption, quality, and operational metrics; communicate results and trade-offs clearly. · Mentor engineers in AI, distributed systems, and security engineering; build shared technical judgment and lead work across teams and partners. Minimum Qualifications: · Bachelor’s degree in computer science, computer engineering, or a related field, with 8+ years of relevant experience; or equivalent practical experience. · Strong hands-on software engineering experience building and operating production services or security products, with proficiency in Go, Java, Python, C++, or a comparable language. · Demonstrated depth in applied AI or machine learning, including the ability to select appropriate approaches and explain their limitations and trade-offs. · Practical experience designing, evaluating, and deploying machine learning, generative AI, large language model, or agent-based systems in production or production-like environments. · Experience creating evaluation and testing methods for AI systems, including quality measurement, failure analysis, robustness, and ongoing performance monitoring. · Experience designing distributed cloud services, APIs, data processing systems, reliability, observability, and secure integrations. · Strong understanding of security and privacy principles, with the ability to identify risks in AI-enabled systems and build appropriate controls. · Proven technical leadership across architecture, implementation, complex issue resolution, and cross-team delivery; strong written and verbal communication skills. Preferred Qualifications: · Experience with SaaS email security or cybersecurity, production AI, threat intelligence, and cloud-native systems or SIEM/SOAR integrations. 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 To ensure that we hire the best talent in the right way, we follow a strict hiring process and recently, Cisco has been made aware of fraudulent recruiters claiming to be from the company. Please be advised that any communication from Cisco about careers will: be in direct response to an application you have submitted through the company career site begin with screening or an interview originate from a Cisco email address, and be conducted across email, phone, or WebEx Cisco will never make a job offer without conducting an interview process or ask you for money in any way. If you have been requested to apply for a role or have received an offer from a site other than https://careers.cisco.com or cisco.wd5.myworkday.com, do not provide any personal identifying information, including your Aadhaar or other personal identifying number, birth certificate, banking information, driver's license, or passport. If you are the target of a recruiting scam, consider filing a report with your local law enforcement authorities. Cisco bears no responsibility, and cannot be held liable, for any claims, damages, expenses, or other inconvenience resulting from or in any way connected to recruiting scams. Cisconians power the future. We make impact as a team, innovating fast and fearlessly to create meaningful solutions on a large scale. The depth and breadth of our technology doesn't just benefit our customers – it also means limitless opportunities for us to experiment and learn. We understand the power each of our unique backgrounds bring when we work together. Because of that, we have a global network of thinkers, doers, experts, and curious creators who help one another do their life’s best work.
Posted Oct 18, 2026
