Hybrid Senior ML Engineer - Scalable LLM Data Pipelines

Cisco; San Jose (CA); Hybrid; USD 210,000 - 297,000; Full time

Job summary

Cisco's AI Research team in Seattle or San Jose is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to architect data and ML systems powering our LLMs. You will design scalable data pipelines, improve labeling workflows, and develop synthetic data generation and evaluation methods.

This role blends ML engineering and data engineering, collaborating with researchers to measure impact on model performance and production‑readiness.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in a STEM field with 7+ years of relevant experience, OR Master’s degree in a STEM field with 4+ years of relevant experience, OR PhD in STEM or a relevant technical field with 1+ years of industry or academic research experience.
• 2+ years of hands‑on experience building, curating, and scaling datasets for machine learning training and evaluation.
• 3+ years of professional programming experience using Python, C++, or Go within a production or research environment.
• 3+ years of experience using machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, or equivalent technologies to develop, train, evaluate, and deploy machine learning models.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and own end‑to‑end data pipelines for ML and LLM training, post‑training, evaluation, and continuous model improvement.
• Build and improve human‑in‑the‑loop data labeling pipelines, including data collection, task generation, annotation workflows, quality control, and feedback integration.
• Develop scalable approaches for synthetic data generation, augmentation, filtering, and validation to improve dataset quality, diversity, and coverage.
• Apply LLMs and other ML techniques to automate data generation, labeling, filtering, scoring, and evaluation.
• Develop systems and metrics to continuously measure dataset quality, including label quality, duplication, contamination, coverage, bias, and distribution shifts.
• Build reliable and scalable infrastructure for processing large volumes of structured and unstructured data.
• Design experiments to understand how dataset quality and composition affect downstream model performance, and use those insights to drive improvements.
• Partner with researchers and ML engineers to develop datasets for model training, fine‑tuning, preference learning, evaluation, and agent development.
• Translate research ideas and prototypes into robust, production‑ready data and ML systems.
• Make architectural and technical decisions across data pipelines, ML infrastructure, storage, compute, and evaluation systems.
• Provide technical leadership through design reviews, engineering best practices, mentoring, and cross‑functional collaboration.

Skills

Python/C++/Go

PyTorch/TensorFlow

Dataset construction

ML systems

Distributed data

LLM data/labeling

Education

STEM degree + experience

Tools

Spark/Ray/Beam

Job description

Cisco's AI Research team in Seattle or San Jose is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to architect data and ML systems powering our LLMs. You will design scalable data pipelines, improve labeling workflows, and develop synthetic data generation and evaluation methods.

This role blends ML engineering and data engineering, collaborating with researchers to measure impact on model performance and production‑readiness.