Software Engineering Technical Leader - Applications
Cisco is hiring a Software Engineering Technical Leader - Applications. Level rates it ; you can apply on Cisco.
Level's read on this job
- Uses AI ●●○○ is how Level rates this role: an ordinary role that requires AI tools.
- Tools and skills the posting cites include C, software architecture and technical leadership.
- Level classifies it as a lead role.
- Level lists 1,400+ other open roles at Cisco.
AI in this role
Lead software engineering role responsible for application architecture in C++ while championing AI-assisted development workflows.
Meet the Team
Cisco’s Webex Engineering Group is at the forefront of the collaboration revolution. We build experiences that power global communication, connecting millions of users across every room, desk, and device. We don’t just build features; we shape the future of hybrid work.
Our team operates with a high degree of autonomy. We value engineers who think like owners, challenge the status quo, and are passionate about building reliable, high-performance software that sets the industry standard.
Your Impact
As a Technical Leader, you will connect product vision with excellent engineering execution and provide hands-on technical leadership across the team.
You will:
- Architect and innovate: Own the technical direction for your domain, making sound architectural decisions that balance customer needs, delivery, maintainability, performance, and long-term platform health.
- Drive technical excellence: Set high standards for modern C++, UI architecture, code quality, testing, security, performance, and operational reliability.
- Shape product strategy: Partner with Product Management and Design from discovery through delivery, turning customer needs and product opportunities into clear technical strategies and influencing the roadmap through engineering insight and innovation.
- Lead delivery: Guide complex features from concept to production. Define the technical approach, break work into clear increments, manage risks and dependencies, and help the team deliver successfully.
- Remain hands-on: Contribute to critical designs and code, lead reviews, solve difficult engineering problems, and model the standards expected across the team.
- Elevate the team: Act as a force multiplier through mentoring, code reviews, design sessions, technical guidance, and clear decision-making.
- Champion AI-first development: Lead the responsible use of AI-assisted workflows across design, implementation, testing, debugging, and analysis, creating measurable improvements in quality and engineering effectiveness.
Minimum Qualifications
- Proven technical leadership: Current or recent experience operating as a Technical Lead, Staff/Principal Engineer, or senior engineer with equivalent scope. You have led architecture and delivery for complex, customer-facing software and influenced technical direction beyond your own individual contributions.
- C++ and client expertise: Deep experience with modern C++ and client application development, including architecture, concurrency, memory management, performance, debugging, and maintainability in a large production codebase.
- UI engineering: Experience designing and delivering sophisticated user interfaces using Qt/QML or a comparable native UI framework, with a clear understanding of responsive, accessible, and high-quality user experiences.
- Systems thinking: Ability to reason across application layers and platform boundaries, understand complex dependencies, and make pragmatic trade-offs among delivery speed, quality, reliability, and long-term sustainability.
- Strategic communication: Ability to explain complex technical concepts, decisions, and trade-offs clearly and align engineers, product partners, designers, and senior stakeholders around a shared direction.
- Ownership: A track record of owning outcomes, using customer feedback and production data to identify root causes and driving systemic improvements that prevent recurrence.
- Mentorship: A passion for developing engineers, with demonstrated success coaching others and raising the technical capability of a team.
- Education and experience: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience, together with 10+ years or equivalent of professional software development experience.
Preferred Qualifications
- Cross-platform client development: Experience building and optimising C++ applications across Windows and macOS, including native platform integration and platform-specific debugging.
- Relevant technology depth: Experience with modern C++, Qt/QML, native Windows or Apple frameworks, and scripting languages such as Python for tooling and automation. Experience with Swift, Objective-C, Kotlin, or Java is useful where client capabilities span mobile platforms.
- Architecture at scale: Experience evolving large, long-lived client codebases, shared libraries, or SDKs while managing compatibility, performance, technical debt, and incremental modernisation.
- Quality and automation: Strong experience with CI/CD, unit and integration testing, UI automation, diagnostics, observability, and reliable client build and release pipelines.
- Data-informed engineering: Experience using telemetry, crash data, performance metrics, and customer feedback to guide priorities and validate improvements.
- AI-first mindset: Practical experience using AI tools for architectural exploration, implementation, refactoring, test generation, debugging, or engineering analysis, with clear ownership of secure, validated, production-ready outcomes.
CollabHiring
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 Engineering Technical Leader - Applications at Cisco rates 45 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Uses AI (AI Level 2 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Uses AI. An ordinary role that requires AI tools.
- ●●●● 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. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.
Prepare for this job
Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Questions you could be asked
- Tell me about a project where software architecture was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where technical leadership was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where ai assisted development was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where client application development was part of your work. What did you do?
- Walk me through how you've used C in your day-to-day work.
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: Software Architecture, Technical Leadership, AI Assisted Development, Client Application Development, and C. 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.
- Put the AI tool in a bullet point about what you did, not just in a skills list. This role treats it as a required part of the job.
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