Senior AI Infrastructure Researcher

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

Job summary

Cisco Systems, Inc. is seeking an AI Researcher on the Foundation AI infrastructure team to design, build, and operate platforms that enable researchers to move ideas to reproducible experiments and deployable models.

You will simplify complex AI workloads, improve observability, and scale experiments across clouds. You will own projects from problem identification to implementation and operation, collaborating with researchers to deliver well-documented capabilities that teams adopt.

Qualifications

• Bachelors + 5 years of related experience in Computer Science, AI, ML, or a 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.

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.
• Create reproducible training and serving environments through automated container builds, dependency management, and release workflows.
• Build reliable rollout collection and isolated execution environments for agentic workloads, including progress tracking and failure recovery.
• Connect experiment configurations, code, datasets, checkpoints, and evaluation results so researchers and agents can reproduce runs and compare outcomes.
• Improve observability and performance across the stack, diagnosing bottlenecks in GPU utilization, data loading, checkpointing, distributed communication and inference.

Skills

Python

PyTorch

ML libraries

LLMs

Data pipelines

System design

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

Megatron

NeMo

VERL

vLLM

SGLang

Job description

Cisco Systems, Inc. is seeking an AI Researcher on the Foundation AI infrastructure team to design, build, and operate platforms that enable researchers to move ideas to reproducible experiments and deployable models.

You will simplify complex AI workloads, improve observability, and scale experiments across clouds. You will own projects from problem identification to implementation and operation, collaborating with researchers to deliver well-documented capabilities that teams adopt.