Cisco
Principal Machine Learning Engineer
$264K–$431K
Milpitas, California, US +1 · Hybrid · Principal · Full-time · Posted Oct 20, 2026
- Location
- Milpitas, California, US
San Francisco, California, US - Experience
- 12+ years with a Bachelor’s degree, 10+ with a Master’s, 7+ with a PhD, or equivalent combination; also requires 8+ years in platform/cloud systems and 4+ years in technical leadership.
- Education
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or related technical field; Master’s or PhD alternatives; or an equivalent combination of education and verified industry experience.
About the job
Leads architecture and technical execution for Cisco’s AI platform and Agentic Ops Solution, building scalable agentic systems and shared infrastructure for enterprise products.
What you'll do
- Define architectural vision, lead system design, and direct technical execution for AI platform capabilities.
- Set technical standards, evaluate technologies, and collaborate across product and engineering teams.
- Mentor engineers and drive cross-functional technical decisions.
What they ask for
- Bachelor’s degree in a related technical field with 12+ years of software engineering experience, or Master’s with 10+ years, or PhD with 7+ years, or an equivalent combination of education and verified industry experience.
- At least 8 years designing and deploying distributed cloud platforms, microservices, or enterprise-scale automation systems.
- At least 4 years in technical leadership driving architecture across multidisciplinary teams.
- Production Generative AI/LLM application experience; hands-on backend or full-stack development with modern languages and cloud-native technologies.
Nice to have
- Experience architecting multi-agent systems or graph-based execution engines; experience with harness engineering and loop engineering.
- Experience with developer platforms, SDKs, APIs, modern front ends, model serving, RAG, or LLM evaluation; relevant patents, publications, or open-source contributions.
Pay
$296,300.00 to $374,800.00 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
Python, Go, TypeScript/Node.js, Kubernetes, Docker, LangGraph, MCP, React
AI focus
Builds production Generative AI applications and LLM/agentic systems, including orchestration, tool calling, multi-agent workflows, and AI platform capabilities.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative