Senior AI Infrastructure Researcher

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

Job summary

Foundation AI, part of Cisco, seeks an AI Researcher to design, build, and operate platforms enabling researchers to turn ideas into reproducible experiments and deployable models. You will simplify launching workloads, observing results, debugging, and scaling AI tasks.

You will own projects from identifying problems to delivering solutions, including training stacks, GPU scheduling, evaluation services, and reproducibility of experiments.

Qualifications

• Bachelors + 5 years of related experience, or Masters + 3 years, or PhD + 0 years in CS/AI or related field.
• Strong experience with Python, PyTorch, production-grade software engineering practices, and common AI/ML libraries
• Experience with large language models, model training, fine-tuning, evaluation, inference, and optimization
• Strong understanding of data pipelines, model experimentation, and scalable AI system design
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to explain complex research and engineering concepts to cross-functional partners

Responsibilities

• Build shared platforms, services, and developer tools for pre-training, fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, evaluation, and inference.
• Develop and operate GPU and CPU computing infrastructure across clouds and regions, including agent sandboxes, workload orchestration, scheduling, resource sharing, storage, and networking.
• Create reproducible training and serving environments through automated container builds, dependency management, compatibility validation, and release workflows.
• Build reliable rollout collection and isolated execution environments for agentic workloads, including progress tracking, failure recovery, resource cleanup, and durable outputs.
• Connect experiment configurations, code, datasets, checkpoints, and evaluation results so researchers and agents can reliably reproduce runs, compare outcomes, and build on prior work.
• Improve observability and performance across the stack, diagnosing bottlenecks in GPU utilization, data loading, checkpointing, distributed communication, and inference.
• Partner with research and data teams to build dependable data and evaluation workflows.
• Work directly with researchers to understand their workflows, debug failures, and deliver well-documented capabilities that teams adopt and use.

Skills

Python

PyTorch

AI/ML libraries

Software engineering practices

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/AI or related

Master's degree in related field

PhD in related field

Tools

Megatron

NeMo

VERL

SGLang

vLLM

Job description

Foundation AI, part of Cisco, seeks an AI Researcher to design, build, and operate platforms enabling researchers to turn ideas into reproducible experiments and deployable models. You will simplify launching workloads, observing results, debugging, and scaling AI tasks.

You will own projects from identifying problems to delivering solutions, including training stacks, GPU scheduling, evaluation services, and reproducibility of experiments.