Cisco
Principal AI Researcher, AISWP (Hybrid)
$264K–$431K
Seattle, Washington, US +1 · Hybrid · Principal · Full-time · Posted Oct 6, 2026
- Location
- Seattle, Washington, US
Milpitas, California, US - Experience
- 15+ years with a STEM bachelor’s, 12+ years with a master’s, or 8+ years of highly relevant research experience with a STEM or related technical PhD; additionally, 5+ years scaling training pipelines and 4+ years applying generative ML to domain-specific systems.
- Education
- Bachelor’s degree in STEM, Master’s degree, or PhD in STEM or a related technical field.
About the job
Defines Cisco’s research strategy and architecture for proprietary, domain-specific foundation models and guides their development and deployment across networking, security, data center, and observability products.
What you'll do
- Set the strategic research roadmap and lead large-scale pre-training, continued pre-training, and reinforcement learning initiatives.
- Architect agentic frameworks and autonomous operations for IT environments, and advise executives on translating research into scalable products.
- Publish influential research and help lead scientific initiatives at major AI venues.
What they ask for
- STEM bachelor’s degree with 15+ years’ experience, master’s with 12+ years, or STEM/related technical PhD with 8+ years of highly relevant research experience.
- Experience architecting and leading multiple full-cycle foundation-model pre-training, continual pre-training, or reinforcement learning pipelines at massive scale.
- At least 6 publications in the named top-tier AI venues, with significant citations or influential contributions.
- 5+ years scaling training pipelines with PyTorch or similar frameworks in massive distributed environments; 4+ years applying generative ML to complex domain-specific systems.
Nice to have
- Production AI Developer Experience architecture, agentic frameworks, or autonomous troubleshooting agents; expertise in optimization, context engineering, efficient serving, and low-latency inference.
- Networking or cybersecurity domain expertise, academic-community leadership, and executive-level communication and mentoring skills.
Pay
$263,700.00 to $333,400.00 USD base salary; $296,300.00 - $431,000.00 USD base salary (New York City Metro Area); $263,700.00 - $383,500.00 USD base salary (Non-Metro New York state & Washington state)
Tools
PyTorch, ACL, EMNLP, ICLR, ICML, NAACL, NeurIPS
AI focus
Develops proprietary domain-specific large language and foundation models, including pre-training, continued pre-training, reinforcement learning, alignment, agentic workflows, and autonomous systems.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative