Senior AI Research Scientist (Frontier Models)

Cisco; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 170,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Foundation AI within Cisco is seeking an AI Researcher to advance frontier AI, focusing on large language models, agentic AI, and enterprise-scale AI applications. You will design experiments, develop new methods, and translate research into practical systems aligned with Cisco's priorities.

You will publish research, contribute to open-source AI projects, and write technical blog posts while building scalable data curation, training, and deployment pipelines for production use.

Qualifications

• PhD/masters or equivalent in CS/AI/ML.
• Strong Python and PyTorch with production-grade practices.
• Experience with LLMs, training, fine-tuning, evaluation, inference, optimization.
• Strong data pipelines, experimentation, and scalable AI system design.
• Excellent communication to explain research to cross-functional partners.

Responsibilities

• Develop scalable data curation and processing methods for model training.
• Build production-ready AI systems with solid software engineering.
• Optimize large language models and agentic systems for enterprise use.

Skills

Python

PyTorch

production-grade software engineering

large language models

model training

fine-tuning

evaluation

inference

optimization

data pipelines

scalable AI system design

communication skills

Education

Bachelors in Computer Science

Masters in AI/ML

PhD in related field

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

MLOps pipelines

AWS

GCP

Azure

NVIDIA Triton

TorchServe

vLLM

Job description

Foundation AI within Cisco is seeking an AI Researcher to advance frontier AI, focusing on large language models, agentic AI, and enterprise-scale AI applications. You will design experiments, develop new methods, and translate research into practical systems aligned with Cisco's priorities.

You will publish research, contribute to open-source AI projects, and write technical blog posts while building scalable data curation, training, and deployment pipelines for production use.