Description
The Cisco AI Research team is seeking a Principal AI Researcher to define the technical vision and overarching architecture for Cisco's proprietary intelligence. The successful candidate will serve as a primary catalyst for how Cisco secures and automates the global network.
Responsibilities:
- Define and drive the overarching strategic research roadmap for purpose-built large language models securing and optimizing Cisco's networking, security, data center, and observability infrastructure.
- Spearhead massive-scale pre-training, continued pre-training (CPT), and advanced reinforcement learning initiatives to establish industry-leading foundational models.
- Architect advanced agentic frameworks and autonomous operations, pushing the boundaries of reasoning capabilities and intelligent routing layers for IT environments.
- Serve as a principal technical advisor to executive leadership, translating abstract AI research breakthroughs into scalable, enterprise-grade product ecosystems.
- Elevate Cisco's position as a premier global leader by publishing high-impact research, spearheading workshop proposals at top-tier AI venues, and driving the broader scientific discourse.
Minimum Qualifications:
- Bachelor's degree in STEM with 15+ years of experience, a Master's degree with 12+ years of experience, or a PhD in STEM or a related technical field with 8+ years of highly relevant research experience.
- Experience architecting and leading multiple full-cycle pre-training, continual pre-training, or reinforcement learning pipelines for massive-scale foundational models.
- Minimum of 6 publications in top-tier AI venues (ACL, EMNLP, ICLR, ICML, NAACL, NeurIPS).
- 5+ years of experience engineering and scaling training pipelines using PyTorch or similar frameworks on massive distributed computing environments.
- 4+ years of experience pioneering the application of generative ML models to highly complex, domain-specific systems.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Demonstrated experience defining the technical architecture for AI Developer Experiences, agentic frameworks, or autonomous troubleshooting agents deployed in production environments.
- Deep expertise in advanced optimization methodologies, including context engineering, efficient serving architectures, and low-latency inference pipelines.
- Exceptional executive-level communication skills, with the ability to influence company-wide technical direction.
- History of organizing or leading initiatives within the academic community.
- Domain expertise in networking or cybersecurity.
Benefits:
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance
- 401(k) plan with Cisco matching contribution
- Paid parental leave
- Short and long-term disability coverage
- Basic life insurance
- Paid time away (vacation, holidays, sick time)
- Optional 10 paid days per year to volunteer
Salary Range: $263,700.00 to $333,400.00