Software Engineering Technical Leader
Cisco is hiring a Software Engineering Technical Leader in Budapest, Hungary. Level rates it ; you can apply on Cisco.
Level's read on this job
- Level rates this role Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
- The posting mentions LangChain, LangGraph and Semantic Kernel among its tools and skills.
- Level classes it as a lead role.
- Cisco has 1,400+ other open roles on Level.
AI in this role
Build and operate production-grade generative and agentic AI capabilities, microservices, and LLM integrations on cloud infrastructure.
Software Engineering Lead, AI & Agentic AI
Meet the Team
Our team builds and runs the cloud-native services and AI capabilities that Cisco engineers, customers, and the wider developer community depend on every day. We take generative and agentic AI out of the demo stage and put it into production, where reliability and security actually matter. The team is a hands-on group of senior engineers who sit close to architects, product, and security, and who stay with their code from first commit through live operations. Nobody here hands work over a wall, and the person who builds a service is the person who keeps it healthy. Agentic AI is changing how software gets built, and this team is where those changes become real for Cisco.
Your Impact
Build and operate secure, scalable microservice applications on AWS and Kubernetes, owning reliability and observability so that customers experience a platform that stays up under load. Develop and integrate AI and agentic capabilities, including LLM integration, retrieval augmented generation, tool and function calling, and agentic workflows, so that emerging technology reaches users as working product. Apply a security-first approach across development, deployment, and operations, covering application, API, container, identity, and data security, because autonomy raises the cost of any gap. Automate testing, delivery, and monitoring through modern DevSecOps practice, and troubleshoot complex production issues through to resolution rather than handoff. Success in this role looks like services you built running reliably in production, AI features customers actually use, and engineering practices that improve because you contributed to them.
Minimum Qualifications
- Bachelors + 8 years of related experience, or Masters + 6 years of related of related experience, or equivalent related work experience.
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience delivering production applications in one or more of Python, Java, Go, JavaScript/TypeScript, or C++.
- 3+ years of experience developing and operating microservices, REST APIs, or distributed applications on a public cloud platform such as AWS.
- 2+ years of experience deploying and operating containerized applications in Kubernetes in a production environment.
- 1+ years of hands-on experience building applications with generative AI or large language models, including work with retrieval augmented generation, embeddings, or tool and function calling.
Preferred Qualifications
- Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.
- Experience developing or integrating AI agents and agentic workflows in an enterprise setting.
- Hands-on experience with agent frameworks such as LangGraph, LangChain, or Semantic Kernel, and with Model Context Protocol or comparable agent-to-tool integration technologies.
- Experience implementing AI security, guardrails, governance, evaluation, or observability for AI systems.
- Track record of mentoring engineers, contributing to engineering standards, and collaborating across teams to deliver customer outcomes.
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 at Cisco rates 85 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.
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. 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
- How would you design a retrieval step so the model answers from real data instead of guessing?
- How have you integrated a large language model into a production application?
- How do you decide when an AI agent can act on its own versus asking for approval first?
- What's a project where you used LangChain hands-on?
- Walk me through how you've used LangGraph in your day-to-day work.
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: RAG, LLM Integration, AI agents, LangChain, and LangGraph. 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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