Cisco

Cisco

Principal Machine Learning Engineer

San Jose, California, US · Principal · Full-time

Sponsorship not specified$296k-$375kDetected 5 days ago
PythonCI/CDMachine LearningPyTorchLLMsRAGLLMOpsCiscoResearchLeadershipPublic Speaking

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odds of building a lasting career here

64Sponsors, lottery-bound
Cap-exempt (no lottery)0
Sponsors this role100
Entry-level history0
PERM / green-card track0
Lottery odds (Level IV)94
Fits your clock70

Sponsors, but it's cap-subject — you still face the weighted lottery (~61% per draw at Level IV). Good if you win; have a cap-exempt backup on your list.

Lottery odds assume a STEM candidate.

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H-1B wage level

the lottery is wage-weighted — each level is one more entry

Level IV · 4×
Level I$152,7971 entry
Level II$187,0752 entries
Level III$221,3743 entries
Level IV$255,6534 entries

This range already reaches Level IV — the maximum four lottery entries.

DOL prevailing wage, 2026-27 wage year · Software Developers (15-1252) · San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. Wage level is derived by USCIS from the offered wage, occupation and worksite; the occupation shown is inferred from the job title.

Employer immigration record

from this employer's Department of Labor filings

Green-card filing pattern in this occupation

Context, not a finding about this posting: of this employer's 289 green-card filings in this occupation, 100% were for a worker who already held the job.

Green-card follow-through: 93%

Of 517 labor certifications old enough to have been used, 34 expired without the employer filing the next step. Median time from filing to decision: 485 days.100% of their filings were for a worker who already held the job.Only certifications past the 180-day window are counted — recent ones cannot have expired yet.

Files H-1B transfers

363 transfer filings in the last year, covering 1371 workers. Median labor-condition decision: 7 days. An employer that already files transfers is one that can take over an existing H-1B.

Sourced from Department of Labor LCA, PERM and prevailing-wage disclosure data. Employer matching is by name, so figures may be split across an employer's legal entities. Absence of a filing means none appears in our copy of the data, not that none exists.

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About the role

  • The application window is expected to close on: 12/23/2026 This is a hybrid role, requiring 3 days per week on site in San Jose, CA
  • Cisco's CX AI Incubation and Agents team owns the foundational AI platform behind intelligent customer experiences across Cisco—the shared layer that application and agent teams across CX build on, in cloud, on-premises, and fully air-gapped customer environments.

Responsibilities

  • You will serve as the architectural and technical authority for designing, building, and scaling the AI foundation powering Cisco IQ and evolving customer needs.
  • As a hands-on technical leader, you will design and build AI systems for production scale.
  • You will set the benchmark for system design, platform governance, and technical excellence across the CX engineering ecosystem.
  • Foundational AI Platform Architecture: Design and build robust, multi-tenant AI services with scalable APIs, versioning, backward compatibility, and quota management across cloud, on-premises, and air-gapped environments.
  • AI Technology Strategy and Execution: Select, evaluate, and implement models, frameworks, inference runtimes, and orchestration technologies.
  • AI Cost Optimization and Standards: Design and implement cost optimization across workloads by improving token efficiency, model selection, inference performance, and compute utilization. Establish measurable engineering standards for cost efficiency.
  • Technical Governance & Leadership by Influence: Lead architecture and design reviews, resolve complex technical trade-offs, mentor senior engineers, and influence platform direction through hands-on technical leadership and execution.

Requirements

  • Bachelors + 14 years of related experience, or Masters + 11 years of related experience, or PhD + 7 years of related experience.
  • Experience architecting and deploying production LLM and/or SLM inference runtimes optimized with continuous batching, KV-cache management, or speculative decoding.
  • Experience architecting and deploying production RAG systems and agentic workflows using vector databases.
  • Experience designing and implementing automated evaluation frameworks for AI systems, including golden test datasets, LLM-as-a-judge methodologies, drift detection, and/or CI/CD regression gates.

Nice to have

  • Research & Thought Leadership: Recognized track record of industry contributions via publications, patents, conference presentations, or core contributions to open-source AI/ML projects.
  • Edge & Resource-Constrained Inference: Hands-on experience optimizing inference workloads for resource-constrained compute environments (CPU, NPU, small GPU footprints, and on-prem hardware appliances).
  • 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.
  • Message to applicants applying to work in the U.S. and/or Canada:
  • U.S. employees are eligible for paid time away as described below, subject to Cisco's policies:
  • Additional paid time away may be requested to deal with critical or emergency issues for family members

Skills

  • The application window is expected to close on: 12/23/2026 This is a hybrid role, requiring 3 days per week on site in San Jose, CA
  • Meet The Team
  • Our work spans classical ML, domain-specific language models, and Agentic AI.
  • What You Will Own & Drive
  • Foundational AI Platform Architecture:
  • AI Technology Strategy and Execution:
  • AI Cost Optimization and Standards:
  • Establish measurable engineering standards for cost efficiency.
  • Technical Governance & Leadership by Influence:

Compensation

  • The starting salary range posted for this position is $296,300.00 to $374,800.00 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

Company info

  • At Cisco, we're revolutionizing how data and infrastructure connect and protect organizations in the AI era - and beyond.
  • These solutions provide customers with unparalleled security, visibility, and insights across the entire digital footprint.
  • We are Cisco, and our power starts with you.
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This listing is sourced directly from Cisco's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.