Cisco
Distinguished Machine Learning Engineer, AISWP (Hybrid)
$305K–$498K
San Jose, California, US · Hybrid · Principal · Full-time · Posted Oct 5, 2026
- Experience
- 17+ years with a Bachelor’s; 14+ with a Master’s; or 10+ with a PhD. Also requires 5+ years at Principal level or above, 2+ years deploying LLM systems, and 10+ years of production coding experience.
- Education
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related field; Master’s or PhD alternatives are stated.
About the job
Leads architecture and technical strategy for Cisco’s agentic AI platforms, turning AI research into secure, scalable production systems for networking operations.
What you'll do
- Set multi-year technical strategy and align architecture across product organizations.
- Design scalable agentic systems for telemetry retrieval, root cause analysis, and automated remediation; establish AI safety, observability, and compliance standards.
- Advise executives and engineering teams, influence technical standards, and mentor senior engineering leaders.
What they ask for
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science or related field with 17+ years of software engineering experience; Master’s with 14+ years; or PhD with 10+ years.
- 5+ years at Principal level or above, with documented technical-strategy influence across at least 3 product organizations.
- 2+ years deploying LLM systems at production scale (10,000+ daily active users or 500+ requests per second); shipped at least 1 production-grade multi-agent system.
- 10+ years writing production-grade Go, Python, or Rust in hyperscale environments; experience implementing at least 3 production safety or observability features.
Nice to have
- Experience with AI governance and enterprise compliance, advanced model post-training, inference optimizations, or external technical-community contributions.
- Experience in AIOps or network management, creating correlated context across network and cloud infrastructure.
Pay
$342,700.00 to $433,400.00 USD base salary; $342,700.00 - $498,400.00 USD base salary (New York City Metro Area); $304,900.00 - $443,500.00 USD base salary (Non-Metro New York state & Washington state)
Tools
Go, Python, Rust, LangGraph, Temporal, Model Context Protocol (MCP), NIST AI RMF, EU AI Act
AI focus
Builds agentic AI systems for autonomous networking operations, including LLM and multi-agent platforms, retrieval, remediation, safety, observability, and governance.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative