Lead AI Architect, Foundation Models & Enterprise AI

Cisco Systems, Inc; Seattle (WA); Hybrid; USD 264,000 - 384,000; Full time

Job summary

Cisco AI Research in Seattle/San Jose is seeking a Principal AI Researcher to define the technical vision for Cisco’s proprietary intelligence and guide multi-year research strategy. You will lead foundation model development, architect agentic workflows, and align research with production deployments.

You will bridge theoretical breakthroughs with hyperscale implementation, steering end-to-end pre-training, alignment, and policy development to advance Cisco’s network security and observability

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in STEM with 15+ years of experience, a Master’s degree with 12+ years, 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, dictating dataset curation, distributed training strategies, and alignment execution.
• Minimum of 6 publications in top-tier AI venues (ACL, EMNLP, ICLR, ICML, NAACL, NeurIPS), with a history of significant citations or influential contributions.
• 5+ years of experience engineering and scaling training pipelines using PyTorch or similar frameworks on massive distributed computing environments (e.g., cluster environments using 1000+ GPUs).
• 4+ years of experience pioneering the application of generative ML models to highly complex, domain-specific systems such as networking, cybersecurity, or data center infrastructure.

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.

Skills

Leadership in AI research

Foundation model development

Agentic frameworks

Publications in AI venues

PyTorch

Education

Bachelor’s degree in STEM with 15+ years of experience, Master’s with 12+ years, or PhD with 8+ years of relevant research

Tools

PyTorch

Distributed training

Job description

Cisco AI Research in Seattle/San Jose is seeking a Principal AI Researcher to define the technical vision for Cisco’s proprietary intelligence and guide multi-year research strategy. You will lead foundation model development, architect agentic workflows, and align research with production deployments.

You will bridge theoretical breakthroughs with hyperscale implementation, steering end-to-end pre-training, alignment, and policy development to advance Cisco’s network security and observability