# Senior Technical Leader, CX AI Foundations

**Company**: Cisco
**Location**: San Jose, CA
**Work arrangement**: hybrid
**Experience**: senior
**Job type**: full-time
**Salary**: $256,900.00 to $333,400.00
**Category**: Engineering
**Industry**: Technology

**Apply**: https://cisco.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Cisco_Careers/job/San-Jose-California-US/Machine-Learning-Engineering-Technical-Leader---CX-AI_2021592?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_8ea1a472-6b7

## Description

This is a hybrid role requiring 3 days per week in the San Jose, CA office.

Cisco's CX AI Foundations team owns the foundational AI platform behind intelligent customer experiences across Cisco. As a senior hands-on technical leader in Cisco’s CX Engineering organisation, you will architect, build, and deliver foundational, enterprise-scale AI services that power critical platform capabilities.

Your responsibilities include:

- Owning complex technical challenges end-to-end, driving model selection and fine-tuning, inference optimisation, agentic infrastructure, multi-tenant API contracts, and air-gapped deployments across diverse compute targets.

- Establishing the benchmark for scientific rigor and statistical evaluation, treating regression gating, judge calibration, and drift detection as mandatory release criteria.

- Mentoring senior engineers through technical depth and influence rather than positional authority.

- Collaborating across product, security, and executive leadership to drive architectural roadmaps, uphold responsible AI governance, and champion engineering excellence across the organisation.

Requirements:

- Bachelor's degree with 11+ years of related experience, or Master's degree with 7+ years of related experience.

- Machine learning experience, including model development, training and adaptation, and evaluation.

- Experience with Python and modern ML frameworks such as PyTorch or JAX or similar.

- Experience taking machine learning work from research or prototype through to production.

- Production experience in at least one foundational AI platform area , model serving and inference, evaluation systems for generative AI, agentic/orchestration infrastructure, or AI platform services and APIs.

- Experience leading full lifecycle projects.

Preferred qualifications:

- Production Platform Ownership: Track record architecting and operating shared AI/ML inference platforms and APIs consumed across multiple teams.

- Incubation to Delivery: Proven experience leading concurrent technical workstreams and navigating AI solutions from experimental incubation through to supported, enterprise-grade production products.

- Engineering Mentorship: Demonstrated success mentoring, coaching, and elevating senior engineers and applied researchers.

- Applied Machine Learning & Inference Systems Depth: Hands-on experience deploying and profiling LLM/SLM serving engines, fine-tuning, distillation, transfer learning, and PEFT/LoRA.

- Enterprise, Edge & MLOps Infrastructure: Experience packaging and delivering AI services into cloud, customer-managed, air-gapped, and resource-constrained compute environments.

Benefits:

- Medical, dental and vision insurance

- 401(k) plan with a Cisco matching contribution

- Paid parental leave

- Short and long-term disability coverage

- Basic life insurance

- Paid time away

- Optional 10 paid days per full calendar year to volunteer

Salary range: $256,900.00 to $333,400.00

## Skills

### Required
- Machine learning
- Python
- Modern ML frameworks
- Production experience
- Leadership

### Nice to have
- AI platform services
- Agentic infrastructure
- API contracts
- Air-gapped deployments
- Statistical evaluation

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Source: [Apply at cisco.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com](https://cisco.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Cisco_Careers/job/San-Jose-California-US/Machine-Learning-Engineering-Technical-Leader---CX-AI_2021592?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply)