Senior ML Engineer: Scalable LLM Data Pipelines

Cisco; Seattle (WA); Hybrid; USD 203,000 - 259,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical Insurance

401(k) with company match

Paid time off

Job summary

Cisco AI Research is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to design and operate data pipelines powering LLMs and AI models. You will collaborate with researchers, data engineers, and ML engineers to determine data needs, create scalable data generation and labeling processes, and measure the impact on model performance.

This hands-on role sits at the intersection of machine learning engineering and data engineering, focusing on building scalable infrastructure, evaluating data quality, and

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in a STEM field with 7+ years of relevant experience, OR Master’s degree in a STEM field with 4+ years of relevant experience, OR PhD in STEM or a relevant technical field with 1+ years of industry or academic research experience.
• 2+ years of hands‑on experience building, curating, and scaling datasets for machine learning training and evaluation.
• 3+ years of professional programming experience using Python, C++, or Go within a production or research environment.
• 3+ years of experience using machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, or equivalent technologies to develop, train, evaluate, and deploy machine learning models.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and own end-to-end data pipelines for ML and LLM training, post-training, evaluation, and continuous model improvement.
• Build and improve human-in-the-loop data labeling pipelines, including data collection, task generation, annotation workflows, quality control, and feedback integration.
• Develop scalable approaches for synthetic data generation, augmentation, filtering, and validation to improve dataset quality, diversity, and coverage.
• Apply LLMs and other ML techniques to automate data generation, labeling, filtering, scoring, and evaluation.
• Develop systems and metrics to continuously measure dataset quality, including label quality, duplication, contamination, coverage, bias, and distribution shifts.
• Build reliable and scalable infrastructure for processing large volumes of structured and unstructured data.
• Design experiments to understand how dataset quality and composition affect downstream model performance, and use those insights to drive improvements.
• Partner with researchers and ML engineers to develop datasets for model training, fine-tuning, preference learning, evaluation, and agent development.
• Translate research ideas and prototypes into robust, production-ready data and ML systems.
• Make architectural and technical decisions across data pipelines, ML infrastructure, storage, compute, and evaluation systems.
• Provide technical leadership through design reviews, engineering best practices, mentoring, and cross-functional collaboration.

Skills

Python

C++

Go

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Data pipelines

ML model development

Research collaboration

Education

Bachelor's degree in STEM

Master's degree in STEM

PhD in STEM

Tools

Spark

Ray

Beam

Job description

Cisco AI Research is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to design and operate data pipelines powering LLMs and AI models. You will collaborate with researchers, data engineers, and ML engineers to determine data needs, create scalable data generation and labeling processes, and measure the impact on model performance.

This hands-on role sits at the intersection of machine learning engineering and data engineering, focusing on building scalable infrastructure, evaluating data quality, and