Software Engineer – Backend & AI Integration

AI in this role

openaianthropiclangchainllamaindexlanggraphdspyhugging-face

rag

Meet the Team

Cisco’s CX Engineering organization is a global team of experts dedicated to delivering world-class digital experiences by building advanced applications and capabilities hosted on Cisco IQ. These tools provide high value directly to our customers and empower our internal teams to deliver superior, data-driven service. We pride ourselves on a culture that balances customer-centricity with technical rigor, solve challenges at the intersection of AI/ML and modern backend engineering.

Your Impact

As a Software Engineer, you will build and scale high-performance server-side applications while integrating modern AI capabilities, including Large Language Models (LLMs). You will own small-to-medium features, collaborate with senior engineering leadership, and help deliver low-latency, reliable software solutions that bring AI into real-world enterprise workflows.

Design, build, and maintain scalable, low-latency microservices, data pipelines, and RESTful/gRPC APIs using Python and frameworks such as FastAPI, Django, or Flask.
Design clean APIs and robust database interactions across relational and NoSQL data stores, including caching and schema evolution.
Implement and optimize Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), prompt orchestration, agentic AI workflows, and vector search capabilities in production systems.
Automate deployments and maintain unit, integration, and API test suites; support containerized workloads using Docker and Kubernetes on AWS, Azure, or GCP.
Monitor production systems, triage incidents, profile performance and resource utilization, and participate in code reviews, postmortems, and on-call rotations.

Minimum Qualifications

3 years of professional software engineering experience delivering production backend services and AI-enabled capabilities.
Proficiency in Python, including object-oriented and asynchronous programming, and experience building RESTful or gRPC APIs with FastAPI, Django, or Flask.
Experience with relational databases and data-access tooling, including PostgreSQL or MySQL, Redis, SQLAlchemy or Django ORM, and database schema migrations.
Experience integrating LLM APIs or open-source models and implementing AI orchestration, RAG, vector search, or hybrid-query workflows.
Experience with Git, automated CI/CD, Docker, Kubernetes concepts, and at least one cloud platform: AWS, Azure, or GCP.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience with LangChain, LangGraph, DSPy, LlamaIndex, OpenAI or Anthropic APIs, and Hugging Face models.
Experience with Pytest, performance profiling, production observability, incident triage, and service reliability practices.
Experience working in Agile teams and collaborating across product, platform, and engineering functions.
Knowledge of networking fundamentals, including TCP/IP, routing and switching, subnetting, and network protocols.
Cisco CCNA, CCNP, Cisco DevNet, or comparable technical certification.

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.

How we rate this

Software Engineer – Backend & AI Integration at Cisco rates 83 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.

●●●● 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

RAGOpenAIAnthropicLangChainLlamaIndexLangGraphDSPyHugging Face

Questions you could be asked

How would you design a retrieval step so the model answers from real data instead of guessing?
Walk me through how you've used OpenAI in your day-to-day work.
What are the limits of Anthropic that you've run into, and how did you work around them?
What's a project where you used LangChain hands-on?
Walk me through how you've used LlamaIndex in your day-to-day work.

Adapt your resume

List these exact terms on your resume: RAG, OpenAI, Anthropic, LangChain, and LlamaIndex. 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.
Lead with what you built, trained or shipped — this role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.

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