Senior AI Research Architect, Foundational Models

Cisco; Milpitas (CA); Hybrid; USD 264,000 - 333,000; Full time

Job summary

Cisco is seeking a Principal AI Researcher to define the technical vision for proprietary intelligence and orchestrate multi-year research across foundation models, agentic workflows, and self-improving systems.

You will bridge theory and hyperscale production, guiding from generalized models to domain-specific architectures while collaborating with leadership to translate breakthroughs into scalable Cisco products.

Qualifications

• Doctoral or equivalent research experience in AI/ML, with focus on large language models or foundational models.
• Experience leading multi-year pre-training and alignment initiatives at scale.
• Strong publication record in top AI venues with high impact and citations.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the strategic research roadmap for purpose-built LLMs securing Cisco’s infrastructure.
• Lead large-scale pre-training and reinforcement learning initiatives for foundational models.
• Architect agentic frameworks and autonomous operations for enterprise IT environments.

Skills

Foundational AI research

Pre-training pipelines

Distributed training

Executive communication

Leadership

Education

PhD in STEM

Master’s degree in STEM

Bachelor’s degree in STEM

Tools

PyTorch

Distributed computing

Job description

Cisco is seeking a Principal AI Researcher to define the technical vision for proprietary intelligence and orchestrate multi-year research across foundation models, agentic workflows, and self-improving systems.

You will bridge theory and hyperscale production, guiding from generalized models to domain-specific architectures while collaborating with leadership to translate breakthroughs into scalable Cisco products.