Cloud Engineer - 4 to 8yrs - Java, Python, AI Tools, Distributed Systems, Docker, Kubernetes

The AI Agent platform team builds the cloud platform for AI agents that hold natural voice and chat conversations and take actions in business systems through APIs. We build and run the real-time services underneath: low-latency streaming services that hold a live, two-way session with each user, stream audio and messages between services, and integrate with external systems, at enterprise scale across multiple regions.

What You’ll Do

- Design, build and operate core real-time services for the AI Agent platform in Java (Java 21, Quarkus) and Python, such as streaming session orchestration, audio and message streaming, integration and callback execution, and usage and quota metering.

- Lead the technical design of the services and features you own: write the spec (contracts, state model, failure modes, capacity, rollout and rollback), drive its review, split it into deliverable increments and lead the implementation.

- Raise the bar for spec-driven development: decide when a change needs a spec, review other engineers’ specs, and keep design docs and API/Protobuf contracts accurate as the system evolves.

- Own the team’s use of AI coding tools: structure specs and repository guidance so the tools produce correct, reviewable changes, and set the review and test standards for AI-generated code.

- Engineer for real-time scale: sub-second latency, many concurrent long-lived streaming sessions and multi-region deployment, using bounded resources, idempotency, backpressure, circuit breaking and graceful degradation.

- Integrate third-party and partner services behind clean adapters with failover, and use latency, reliability and cost data to drive provider and design decisions.

- Define the test and release strategy for your areas: functional, load and uncertainty test gates, plus canary rollout and rollback readiness.

- Own production health for your services (SLOs, dashboards and alerts), and lead high-severity incident investigations and root-cause analysis through to permanent fixes.

- Mentor engineers through design and code reviews, and shape roadmap, estimates and cross-team decisions with architects, product management, SRE, security and the product teams that use the platform.

Minimum Qualifications (Must Have)

- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field, or equivalent practical experience, with 4+ years of professional backend software development, including ownership of production services.

- Strong experience in Java (Java 17 or later): you have designed, built and operated production microservices with Quarkus, Spring Boot or a similar framework, including concurrent and asynchronous code.

- Hands on experience in Python in production services, tooling or test automation.

- Experience designing distributed systems: microservices, streaming or event-driven communication (such as gRPC, WebSockets or Kafka), and failure handling with timeouts, retries and idempotency.

- Strong experience running production workloads with Docker and Kubernetes on a public cloud (AWS, Azure or Google Cloud).

- Spec-driven development: you have written specs and design docs before implementation, led their review, and can coach other engineers to work this way.

- AI-assisted development: you use AI tools such as GitHub Copilot, Cursor, ChatGPT or Codex daily, and you can set practical team guidelines for using them safely and productively.

Preferred Qualifications (Good to Have)

- Quarkus, gRPC with Protocol Buffers, and long-lived bidirectional streaming.

- Reactive and concurrent Java at scale: Vert.x, Mutiny or Project Reactor, and virtual threads.

- Large-scale, multi-tenant, multi-region SaaS, including capacity planning, SLOs and error budgets.

- Real-time communications and media: WebRTC, SIP, audio streaming and media servers.

- API gateways, rate limiting, usage metering and quota enforcement.

- Kafka, Redis, PostgreSQL and MongoDB, including transactional outbox and other event-driven patterns.

- Helm, Terraform, Argo CD, Jenkins or GitHub Actions, with multifaceted delivery and feature flags.

- Observability with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger or Splunk.

- Load, endurance and uncertainty testing, including dependency simulators for performance testing.

- Security for multi-tenant SaaS: OWASP Top 10, OAuth 2.0 and JWT, secrets management and tenant isolation.

- Experience building shared platforms or APIs used by other product teams.

- Patents, open-source contributions or conference talks.

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. 

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