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