Senior AI Researcher

What you'll do

• Identify research opportunities, develop original hypotheses, and lead research programs across AI areas.
• Collaborate with engineering and product teams to translate research into scalable technologies; lead projects from conception to deployment.
• Mentor researchers, shape technical strategy, and represent Cisco through publications, open-source work, and research-community collaboration.

What they ask for

• PhD in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or a related technical field, plus 5+ years of relevant research experience, or equivalent demonstrated research impact.
• Track record of sustained, high-impact publications at top-tier AI or machine-learning conferences.
• Expertise in one or more listed AI research areas, evidenced by 5+ years of relevant research/engineering experience and/or multiple production-scale deployments, publications, or open-source contributions.
• 5+ years of hands-on Python and PyTorch experience, including model training and optimization in multi-GPU or distributed environments; ability to lead complex technical projects from conception to deployment.

Nice to have

• Distributed training across thousands of GPUs; experience with inference engines, cloud-native deployment, MLOps, and major cloud platforms.
• Experience with agentic AI systems, security-focused AI or robust machine learning, or service as an Area Chair or senior program committee member.

Pay

$216,300.00 to $280,800.00 (base salary); $216,300.00 - $322,900.00 (base salary); $197,500.00 - $287,300.00 (base salary)

Tools

Python, PyTorch, CUDA, NCCL, FSDP2, Megatron-LM, vLLM, SGLang

AI focus

Leads research in foundation models, agentic AI, reasoning, multimodal learning, scalable training, evaluation, inference optimization, and AI systems; translates research into production-scale enterprise technologies.