{"id":648995,"url":"https://alion.io/job/cisco-systems-software-technical-leader-test-automation-splunk","title":"Software Technical Leader, Test Automation, Splunk","company":{"id":90,"name":"Cisco Systems","domain":"cisco.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/cisco-systems","size_band":"5000+","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Workday","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":92,"open_postings":204,"ghost_share":0.01,"stale_share":0.446,"repost_share":0.059,"time_to_fill_p50_days":16,"computed_at":"2026-10-01T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"QA","role_family":"QA","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Jose, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":186900,"max":307800,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":307800},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":10,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Agentic Workflows","optional":true},{"name":"Claude","optional":true},{"name":"JMeter","optional":true},{"name":"k6","optional":true},{"name":"LangChain","optional":true},{"name":"LangSmith","optional":true},{"name":"Playwright","optional":true},{"name":"Prompt Engineering","optional":true}],"status":"closed","first_seen_at":"2026-08-28T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-22","last_verified_at":"2026-09-29T01:32:26Z","board_verified":false,"closed_at":"2026-09-29T01:32:26Z","days_open":32,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":1,"flags":[],"days_open":31},"description":"The application window is expected to close on: 10/01/2026Meet the Team\nAre you ready to shape the future of AI-powered quality? We are seeking a visionary Technical Leader to architect the bold roadmap for our AI-agentic Security Operations Center (SOC)! Together, we define the strategic direction that secures the absolute reliability and performance of our most complex systems. We work to mentor world-class engineering talent, drive the adoption of groundbreaking benchmarking, and catalyze the evolution of our quality ecosystems. Join us as we work to transform high-level challenges into scalable, high-impact solutions.\nYour Impact\nThis role is designed for a strategic innovator who translates high-level quality challenges into scalable architectural solutions, driving engineering efficiency through sophisticated evaluation strategies and multi-functional leadership. In this role, you will mentor top-tier engineering talent and implement groundbreaking benchmarking protocols that redefine technical performance! Responsibilities include:\nArchitectural Leadership: Define and oversee the architectural roadmap for PQ foundations and evaluation frameworks, ensuring robust assessment capabilities for AI agents, complex workflows, and underlying system processes.\n\nStrategic Innovation: Identify systemic gaps in testing methodologies and lead the development of AI-based solutions or agents to proactively mitigate risk and enhance system integrity.\n\nTechnical Mentorship & Oversight: Drive the technical culture by mentoring engineering talent, conducting architectural reviews, and guiding teams through the validation of complex technical hypotheses.\n\nExperimental Governance: Oversee the lifecycle of proof-of-concepts (POCs), establishing rigorous standards for experimentation and the validation of novel testing paradigms.\n\nQuality Ecosystem Management: Ensure that testing processes consistently deliver reliable, high-quality outcomes at scale, maintaining alignment with enterprise-level quality standards.\n\nAdvanced Validation Strategy: Set the technical standard for groundbreaking validation techniques, including LLM-as-judge methodologies, tenant isolation probes, and behavioral regression suites.\n\nCross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with engineering leadership to enforce rigorous contract testing, audit log validation, and security compliance, ensuring seamless integration of quality across the development lifecycle.\n\nMinimum Qualifications\nBachelor’s degree plus 10+ years of experience in software development and test automation, to include experience architecting large-scale testing ecosystems.\n\nDemonstrated experience in programming, to include Python and Go, with a demonstrated ability to design scalable, maintainable, and high-performance testing infrastructure.\n\nDemonstrated experience with security compliance frameworks.\n\nDemonstrated experience with modern performance testing methodologies.\n\nDemonstrated experience using AI to build automation (writing AI skills to build test automation)\n\nPreferred Qualifications\nLeadership & Problem-Solving: Exceptional capacity to translate complex, ambiguous quality challenges into structured, actionable, and long-term architectural strategies.\n\nStrategic Vision: Proven ability to innovate within the AI/ML landscape, applying modern tooling to drive detection efficacy and system reliability.\n\nTest Automation: Go, Python, Contract testing frameworks, Playwright.\n\nSecurity & Compliance: OCSF validation libraries, vacuum linter, Caldera, tenant isolation probes, and audit log validation.\n\nAI/ML Testing: Deep expertise in LLM APIs (Claude, Codex), prompt engineering, and the design of agentic workflows. Proficiency in demonstrating LangChain and LangSmith to ensure model reliability, AI behavioral regression, and LLM-as-judge frameworks.\n\nPerformance Testing: K6, Terra VM (Security Suite), and JMeter.\n\nWhy Cisco?\nAt 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.\nFueled 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.\nWe are Cisco, and our power starts with you.\nMessage to applicants applying to work in the U.S. and/or Canada:\nThe starting salary range posted for this position is $186,900.00 to $267,700.00 and reflects the projected salary range for new hires in this position in U.S. and/or Canada locations, not including incentive compensation*, equity, or benefits.Individual pay is determined by the candidate's hiring location, market conditions, job-related skillset, experience, qualifications, education, certifications, and/or training. The full salary range for certain locations is listed below. For locations not listed below, the recruiter can share more details about compensation for the role in your location during the hiring process.\nU.S. employees are offered benefits, subject to Cisco’s plan eligibility rules, which include medical, dental and vision insurance, a 401(k) plan with a Cisco matching contribution, paid parental leave, short and long-term disability coverage, and basic life insurance. Please see the Cisco careers site to discover more benefits and perks. Employees may be eligible to receive grants of Cisco restricted stock units, which vest following continued employment with Cisco for defined periods of time.\nU.S. employees are eligible for paid time away as described below, subject to Cisco’s policies:\n10 paid holidays per full calendar year, plus 1 floating holiday for non-exempt employees\n\n1 paid day off for employee’s birthday, paid year-end holiday shutdown, and 4 paid days off for personal wellness determined by Cisco\n\nNon-exempt employees** receive 16 days of paid vacation time per full calendar year, accrued at rate of 4.92 hours per pay period for full-time employees\n\nExempt employees participate in Cisco’s flexible vacation time off program, which has no defined limit on how much vacation time eligible employees may use (subject to availability and some business limitations)\n\n80 hours of sick time off provided on hire date and each January 1st thereafter, and up to 80 hours of unused sick time carried forward from one calendar year to the next\n\nAdditional paid time away may be requested to deal with critical or emergency issues for family members\n\nOptional 10 paid days per full calendar year to volunteer\n\nFor non-sales roles, employees are also eligible to earn annual bonuses subject to Cisco’s policies.\nEmployees on sales plans earn performance-based incentive pay on top of their base salary, which is split between quota and non-quota components, subject to the applicable Cisco plan. For quota-based incentive pay, Cisco typically pays as follows:\n.75% of incentive target for each 1% of revenue attainment up to 50% of quota;\n\n1.5% of incentive target for each 1% of attainment between 50% and 75%;\n\n1% of incentive target for each 1% of attainment between 75% and 100%; and\n\nOnce performance exceeds 100% attainment, incentive rates are at or above 1% for each 1% of attainment with no cap on incentive compensation.\n\nFor non-quota-based sales performance elements such as strategic sales objectives, Cisco may pay 0% up to 125% of target. Cisco sales plans do not have a minimum threshold of performance for sales incentive compensation to be paid.\nThe applicable full salary ranges for this position, by specific state, are listed below:\nNew York City Metro Area:\n$186,900.00 - $307,800.00Non-Metro New York state & Washington state:\n$166,300.00 - $274,100.00* For quota-based sales roles on Cisco’s sales plan, the ranges provided in this posting include base pay and sales target incentive compensation combined.\n** Employees in Illinois, whether exempt or non-exempt, will participate in a unique time off program to meet local requirements.","description_format":"text","description_chars":8428,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":10,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Annual bonuses","Equity","Life insurance","Parental leave","Restricted stock units","Vision insurance"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Network Security","Unified Communications","Network Equipment","Observability & APM"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-10T20:19:27Z"},{"event":"close","at":"2026-09-18T09:38:21Z"},{"event":"reopen","at":"2026-09-22T21:04:26Z"},{"event":"close","at":"2026-09-29T01:32:26Z"}],"liveness":null,"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":307800,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/cisco-systems-software-technical-leader-test-automation-splunk","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/cisco-systems-software-technical-leader-test-automation-splunk.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-01T08:13:53Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","usage":{"tier":"search","counted_by":"address","units_charged":0,"used_today":0,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":null,"resets_at":"2026-10-02T00:00:00Z"}}}