Cisco
Senior AI Researcher
San Francisco, California, US · Senior · Full-time
Sponsorship not specified$212k-$276kDetected 7 days ago
PythonAlgorithmsCode ReviewAWSGCPCloud PlatformsDockerKubernetesMachine LearningPyTorchLLMsAgentic AIMLOpsCybersecurityCiscoResearchExperimental DesignLeadershipCommunicationCollaboration
About the role
- The application window is expected to close on: 08/14/2026 Job posting may be removed earlier if the position is filled or if a sufficient number of applications are received.
- Our research spans foundation models, agentic AI, multimodal learning, reasoning systems, scalable training algorithms, evaluation science, inference optimization, and AI systems infrastructure.
- We believe impactful research should advance both science and products.
Responsibilities
- Design and build new evaluation benchmarks and frameworks that improve the reliability, transparency and safety of AI models.
- Collaborate across research, engineering, product, and security teams to translate research into production AI systems and drive the adoption of the new research across Cisco's AI portfolio.
Requirements
- Exceptional ability to communicate complex scientific concepts to both highly technical peers and non-technical executive stakeholders.
- Experience deploying high-performance inference engines such as vLLM and SGLang, and working with cloud-native deployment, Docker, Kubernetes, MLOps pipelines, and major cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.
- Experience designing and scaling agentic AI workflows, multi-agent frameworks, and autonomous AI systems.
Compensation
- The starting salary range posted for this position is $212,300.00 to $275,800.00 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 benef
Benefits
- 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.
- 10 paid holidays per full calendar year, plus 1 floating holiday for non-exempt employees
- 1 paid day off for employee's birthday, paid year-end holiday shutdown, and 4 paid days off for personal wellness determined by Cisco
- Non-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
- Exempt 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)
- 80 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
- Invent and pioneer novel architectures and algorithms for foundation model training and inference, complex reasoning agentic AI systems, and multimodal learning.
- Individual pay is determined by the candidate's hiring location, market conditions, job-related skillset, experience, qualifications, education, certifications, and/or training.
This listing is sourced directly from Cisco's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.