**Meet the Team:** The AutoQuote team at Cisco builds and operates the automated quoting platform that powers Cisco's global renewals business. Our mission is to generate accurate, ready-to-order quotes at scale — minimizing manual effort for partners and distributors, reducing booking friction, and driving simplification across Cisco's renewal workflows. We are a product engineering team running a homegrown, cloud-native application hosted on GCP. Our stack is built on a microservices architecture orchestrated with Kubernetes, with Prefect managing our data and workflow pipelines, and Pub/Sub and REST APIs handling communication across services. We move fast, operate at scale, and are actively integrating AI capabilities into the core of what we build. **Your Impact:** We are seeking an experienced technical leader to serve as Leader, Data Science on the AutoQuote team at Cisco. This is a principal-level engineering and technical leadership role responsible for driving the architecture, AI strategy, and engineering direction of AutoQuote's cloud-native software platform. The ideal candidate brings deep software engineering expertise, a track record of leading complex technical initiatives, and the technical authority to elevate the team around them. AI fluency is a non-negotiable expectation of this role — not just personal proficiency, but the ability to actively drive AI adoption across the team, govern its use responsibly, and continuously push the boundaries of what AI-assisted engineering can deliver. This leader will set the technical tone for how the AutoQuote engineering organization builds. **What You'll do:** • Own the technical architecture and engineering strategy for AutoQuote's cloud-native platform — spanning AI feature integration, data pipeline infrastructure, microservices design, and platform reliability. • Lead the design and delivery of the highest-complexity, highest-impact engineering initiatives on the team, setting the architectural patterns and engineering standards that guide the broader organization. • Define and enforce software quality standards, AI usage guidelines, and engineering best practices across the AutoQuote engineering organization. • Partner with engineering leadership, product management, and program stakeholders to translate program strategy into a coherent technical roadmap and prioritized backlog. • Evaluate, prototype, and champion emerging AI capabilities — including LLM integration, agentic frameworks, and AI-assisted development tooling — driving adoption across the team and into the product. • Drive responsible AI governance across AutoQuote, including prompt engineering standards, AI output evaluation practices, and compliance with Cisco security and data handling policies. • Mentor and technically develop senior and mid-level engineers; serve as the primary technical authority and critical issue point for complex engineering decisions. • Lead architecture reviews, critical design decisions, and cross-functional technical alignment sessions. • Represent AutoQuote engineering in program-level and executive forums; communicate technical tradeoffs, risks, and decisions with clarity to both technical and non-technical audiences. **Minimum Qualifications:** • Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field; advanced degree preferred. • 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a demonstrated track record at the principal, staff, or distinguished engineer level. • Deep proficiency in Python; demonstrated ability to architect polyglot, cloud-native solutions — technology selection should always be driven by what is right for the problem, not a single prescribed stack. • Proven expertise in cloud-native architecture on GCP and/or AWS, including Kubernetes, distributed systems, managed AI/ML services, and data pipeline infrastructure. • Extensive hands-on experience applying AI/ML services and frameworks (LLM APIs, LangChain, cloud-managed AI services) in production engineering environments. • Demonstrated mastery of LLMs as engineering tools — prompt engineering, AI-assisted development, model output evaluation, and designing AI-powered workflows and agentic systems. • Track record of setting technical standards, driving architecture decisions at a program or organization level, and leading cross-functional engineering initiatives. • Strong technical communication skills — able to write crisp technical proposals, represent engineering tradeoffs to executive stakeholders, and influence without direct authority. • Experience operating and improving high-availability production systems at enterprise scale. **Preferred Qualifications:** • Experience designing and delivering agentic AI systems or multi-agent orchestration frameworks in a production engineering environment. • Cloud or AI certifications at the professional or specialization level (GCP Professional, AWS Professional, or equivalent). • Prior experience in a staff, principal, or distinguished engineering role within a large-scale product engineering organization. • Familiarity with enterprise AI governance, responsible AI frameworks, or model evaluation and monitoring practices. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION • This role operates at the principal engineer level — deep technical authority combined with leadership through influence across the AutoQuote engineering organization. • Strong AI mastery is a non-negotiable expectation: the candidate should be actively pushing the state of AI-assisted development on the team and within the broader organization. • The candidate will work closely with program and engineering leadership and is expected to represent technical decisions and tradeoffs clearly to non-technical audiences. • All work is conducted in alignment to Cisco security policy and compliance requirements, including responsible handling of data and AI-generated content. # 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.