AI Infrastructure Researcher — Scale & GPU Systems

Cisco Systems, Inc; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 184,000 - 239,000; Full time

Job summary

Foundation AI at Cisco is seeking an AI Researcher to design, build, and operate platforms that move ideas from research to reproducible experiments and deployable models. You will make complex AI workloads easier to launch, observe, debug, and scale, owning projects from problem discovery to reliable solutions.

You will collaborate with researchers to ensure scalable AI system design, data pipelines, and evaluation workflows, and you may contribute to open-source infrastructure and technical

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree with 5+ years or Master's with 3+ years or PhD with 0+ years in CS/AI/ML.
• Strong experience with Python and PyTorch; production-grade software practices.
• Experience with large language models, training, fine-tuning, evaluation and inference.
• Understanding of data pipelines, model experimentation and scalable AI architectures.
• Excellent communication skills to explain complex concepts across teams.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate platforms for pre-training, fine-tuning, evaluation and inference.
• Develop GPU/CPU infrastructure across clouds and regions.
• Create reproducible training and serving environments with automated workflows.
• Improve observability and performance across the stack; diagnose bottlenecks.
• Collaborate with researchers and data teams to deploy dependable AI capabilities.

Skills

Python and PyTorch (strong programming

AI/ML systems experience

Data pipelines and experiments

Communication skills

Education

Bachelor's/Master's/PhD in CS/AI/ML

Tools

Megatron

NeMo

VERL

vLLM

SGLang

Cloud platforms (AWS/GCP)

Job description

Foundation AI at Cisco is seeking an AI Researcher to design, build, and operate platforms that move ideas from research to reproducible experiments and deployable models. You will make complex AI workloads easier to launch, observe, debug, and scale, owning projects from problem discovery to reliable solutions.

You will collaborate with researchers to ensure scalable AI system design, data pipelines, and evaluation workflows, and you may contribute to open-source infrastructure and technical