Principal AI Researcher: Foundation Models & Agentic AI

Cisco

Seattle (WA)

Hybrid

USD 264,000 - 333,000

Full time

32 hours ago

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Job summary

Cisco AI Research seeks a Principal AI Researcher to shape the technical vision and architecture for proprietary intelligence. You will guide multi-year strategy, driving foundation model development and agentic workflows across Cisco’s networking, security, and observability domains.

You will translate breakthroughs into scalable, enterprise-grade product ecosystems, lead large-scale pre-training, and publish impactful research at top venues, positioning Cisco at the forefront of AI innovation.

Qualifications

PhD with 8+ years of relevant research experience or Master with 12+ years or Bachelor with 15+ years in STEM.
Experience architecting and leading full-cycle pre-training, continual pre-training, or RL pipelines for large models.
6+ publications in top AI venues (ACL, EMNLP, ICLR, ICML, NAACL, NeurIPS).
5+ years of engineering experience with large-scale distributed training (1000+ GPUs).
4+ years applying generative ML to complex domains like networking or cybersecurity.

Responsibilities

Define the technical vision and architecture for Cisco’s proprietary intelligence.
Lead multi-year research strategy and foundational model development.
Architect agentic frameworks and autonomous operations for enterprise environments.
Advise executives translating research breakthroughs into scalable products.
Publish high-impact research and represent Cisco at AI venues.