Director, Physical AI

Cisco•San Jose, CA

About The Position

Cisco's Enterprise AI Platforms & Infrastructure organization is establishing a Physical AI and Common Services engineering field to extend autonomous intelligence from software agents into physical enterprise environments. The Director of Physical AI and Common Services will lead the end-to-end strategy, technical architecture, mechatronic modifications, and software engineering for quadrupedal and bipedal robotic fleets, connecting on-chassis edge AI compute with Cisco's enterprise AI fabric. The role includes ownership of hardware customization, on-chassis software development, operational pilots across campuses and data centers, and multidisciplinary safety governance. The director will lead technical evaluation, procurement co-development, and engineering execution for quadrupedal and humanoid platforms, including technical co-development milestones and Joint Development Agreements with robotics manufacturers. The role also oversees robot retrofits and sensor and communications integrations, autonomous concierge and patrol deployments, edge AI and sensor-fusion pipelines, and integration of robots with Cisco's AI agent ecosystem and enterprise security systems. The position also manages the robotics sandbox lab, simulation environments, and physical staging cages, and coordinates safety planning with internal teams and municipal fire authorities. The director partners with Workplace Resources, Environmental Health & Safety, Global Procurement Services, Corporate Security, Legal/IP, and Outshift on deployment, vendor, security, intellectual-property, and research matters.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Robotics, Mechatronics Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical work experience.
10+ years of professional engineering experience in robotics, mechatronics, embedded systems, or autonomous physical hardware systems.
Direct technical leadership experience managing multidisciplinary engineering teams, such as mechatronics, firmware, computer vision, or robotics software teams.
Experience developing, integrating, or deploying autonomous mobile robot (AMR), quadrupedal, or robotic platforms.
Experience programming in C++ or Python for robotics, embedded systems, or edge compute applications.

Nice To Haves

Master's degree or Ph.D. in Robotics, Mechatronics Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or equivalent work experience in a related technical field.
Expertise in ROS/ROS 2 (Humble/Iron/Rolling), Nav2, local SLAM, LiDAR-inertial odometry, 360-degree obstacle avoidance, and Sim2Real platforms such as NVIDIA Isaac Sim/Isaac ROS, Gazebo, or MuJoCo.
Experience with mechanical payload design, rapid prototyping, actuator dynamics, legged-locomotion kinematics and dynamics, power distribution boards, high-density Li-ion BMS, FreeRTOS, CAN bus, EtherCAT, USB 3.2, I2C, and SPI.
Experience with on-device AI acceleration, including NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin, TensorRT, CUDA, and ONNX Runtime; real-time speech-to-speech models, Whisper, lightweight SLMs, wake-word detection, 3D point-cloud perception, depth estimation, thermal vision, and VLA models.
Experience with fleet management bridges such as Boston Dynamics Orbit or Formant, MCP, A2A protocol design, distributed pub/sub architectures, and gRPC/REST APIs.
Experience implementing 802.1X wireless authentication, Duo/Okta identity, mTLS zero-trust communication, ISO 25785-1 industrial mobile robot safety compliance, and data privacy governance.
Demonstrated experience building, operating, and safety-certifying physical robotics laboratories, including high-density battery containment, municipal fire suppression compliance, and physical hazard mitigation.
Proven track record structuring and driving Joint Development Agreements and co-development programs with commercial robotics OEMs.

Responsibilities

Lead technical evaluation, procurement co-development, and engineering execution across quadrupedal and bipedal/humanoid robotic systems.
Establish technical co-development milestones and Joint Development Agreements with robotics manufacturers to support hosting Cisco intelligence containers, LLMs, and agent runtimes directly on robots.
Direct physical robot retrofits, mechanical bracket design, and integration of thermal imaging, LiDAR, depth cameras, Meraki surveillance, far-field microphone arrays, directional speakers, and RFID/NFC badging hardware.
Design, deploy, and operationalize autonomous concierge robots in executive briefing facilities.
Integrate conversational speech-to-speech AI, wake-word detection, LED intent signaling, and guest credential verification into concierge robots.
Implement lead/follow behaviors, 360-degree obstacle avoidance, door and portal actuation protocols, and waypoint generation to escort executives and guests.
Architect and deploy autonomous quadruped and humanoid patrol routines across Cisco global data centers.
Build on-chassis edge ML pipelines to detect equipment issues such as failing server cooling fans, power supplies, and mechanical bearing wear.
Deploy thermal imaging, OCR for server status indicators, cable path verification, and environmental telemetry audits integrated with Cisco SRE monitoring systems.
Architect on-chassis edge compute payloads running containerized ROS 2 environments with high-throughput sensor fusion.
Connect robots to Cisco's Circuit/MyAgent ecosystem through MCP and A2A interfaces so AI agents can securely command and query robots.
Implement 802.1X network authentication, Duo/Okta identity federation, and zero-trust edge access control.
Enforce edge data filtering and prevent persistent storage of visitor video, images, or audio in accordance with Cisco DPP standards.
Manage and expand the robotics sandbox lab, simulation environments, and physical staging cages.
Partner with Workplace Resources, EHS, and local municipal fire authorities to establish battery containment, fire suppression protocols, and safety gating.
Collaborate with Global Procurement Services on preferred vendor onboarding, Corporate Security on outdoor perimeter pilots, Legal/IP on patent harvesting and JDA boundaries, and Outshift on joint robotics research.

Benefits

Medical, dental, and vision insurance
401(k) plan with Cisco matching contribution
Paid parental leave
Short- and long-term disability coverage
Basic life insurance
Cisco restricted stock unit grants may be available, subject to eligibility and vesting conditions.
Paid holidays and a floating holiday for non-exempt employees
Paid birthday day off, year-end holiday shutdown, and personal wellness days
Paid vacation or flexible vacation time off, depending on employee classification
Sick time off
Additional paid time away may be requested for critical or emergency family issues
Optional paid volunteer days
Annual bonuses may be available for non-sales roles, subject to Cisco policies