Software Engineer, Autonomous Security - ThousandEyes
AI in this role
Meet the Team
Cisco ThousandEyes is a Digital Assurance platform that empowers organizations to deliver flawless digital experiences across every network – even the ones they don’t own. Powered by AI and an unmatched set of cloud, internet and enterprise network telemetry data, ThousandEyes enables IT teams to proactively detect, diagnose, and remediate issues – before they impact end- user experiences.
ThousandEyes is deeply integrated across the entire Cisco technology portfolio and beyond, helping customers deploy at scale while also delivering AI-powered assurance insights within Cisco’s leading Networking, Security, Collaboration, and Observability portfolios.
Your Impact
We are seeking a visionary Software Engineer to join our newly formed Autonomous Security team. This is not a traditional "monitor and patch" role. In this position, you will be at the forefront of the next evolution of cybersecurity: Autonomous (AI) Security Team.
Your mission will be to design, build, and deploy AI agents that act as autonomous security researchers and first responders. You will move our security posture from "Human-in-the-loop" to "Human-on-the-loop," creating a self-healing infrastructure that identifies, tests, and mitigates vulnerabilities at machine speed.
- AI Agent Development: Build and fine-tune LLM-based agents to perform automated vulnerability research and code analysis.
- Autonomous Remediation: Develop "self-healing" pipelines that automatically generate, test, and deploy security patches and dependency updates via Kargo and ArgoCD.
- Threat Mitigation: Design AI-driven logic to detect anomalous traffic patterns and autonomously update WAF rules or service mesh configurations to neutralize external threats in real-time.
- Pipeline Integration: Integrate AI security tooling directly into our CI/CD lifecycle, ensuring that security is an automated, invisible, and frictionless part of the development process.
- Security Orchestration: Build the "nervous system" that connects security scanning tools (Snyk, Wiz, etc.) with AI agents to prioritize and resolve alerts without manual triage.
Minimum Qualifications
- Programming & Automation: 3+ years developing production software, backend services, or automated tooling using Python or Go.
- Cloud-Native & CI/CD: Hands-on experience containerizing applications, managing Kubernetes deployments, and building automated CI/CD or GitOps pipelines (e.g., ArgoCD, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI).
- Application Security: Demonstrated experience implementing secure coding practices, applying OWASP Top 10 mitigation strategies, and remediating CVEs in cloud environments.
- AI/LLM Engineering: Practical experience integrating Large Language Model (LLM) APIs, structured prompt workflows, or agentic frameworks into software applications.
Preferred Qualifications
- Familiarity with vector databases (Pinecone, Milvus) for security context retrieval.
- Familiarity with "Policy as Code" (OPA/Rego).
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.
How we rate this
Software Engineer, Autonomous Security - ThousandEyes at Cisco rates 70 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Works on AI (AI Level 3 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Works on AI. The daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Open the description and count.
Prepare for this job
A free preview built only from this posting: what it asks for, what you could be asked in an interview, and how to adjust your resume.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Questions you could be asked
- How do you decide when an AI agent can act on its own versus asking for approval first?
- Walk me through how you've used Pinecone in your day-to-day work.
- What are the limits of Milvus that you've run into, and how did you work around them?
- Describe a typical day in a role like this one: which parts run through AI directly?
- If you removed AI from this role, what would be left, and how do you decide what still needs a human?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: AI Agents, Pinecone, and Milvus. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
- Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them — a tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
- Show where AI is part of your daily process, not a one-off project — this role expects it to be a running habit.
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