Director, Physical AI
About The Position
Cisco's Enterprise AI Platforms & Infrastructure (EAIPI) organization is establishing a Physical AI and Common Services engineering field to extend autonomous intelligence into physical enterprise environments. The organization supports the development, design, and optimization of IT, robotics, and edge systems, including enterprise systems, application software, network and database integration, and third-party platform integration. The Director of Physical AI and Common Services will lead strategy, technical architecture, mechatronic modifications, and software engineering for quadrupedal and bipedal robotic fleets. The role owns hardware customization, on-chassis software development, campus and data center operational pilots, and multidisciplinary safety governance. It also directs technical evaluation and procurement co-development, manufacturer joint development agreements, robotic platform retrofits and integrations, and secure connections between physical robots and Cisco's enterprise AI ecosystem. The position covers autonomous concierge and patrol use cases, edge AI and sensor-fusion pipelines, privacy and zero-trust controls, robotics laboratory operations, and safety coordination with internal teams and local authorities. The director will collaborate with procurement, workplace resources, environmental health and safety, corporate security, legal/IP, and research partners.
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 or more 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 robots (AMRs), quadrupedal robots, or other 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, or Rolling), Nav2 navigation stacks, 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 lithium-ion battery management systems, FreeRTOS, CAN bus, EtherCAT, USB 3.2, I2C, and SPI.
- Experience with on-device AI acceleration using NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin, TensorRT, CUDA, or ONNX Runtime; real-time speech-to-speech models, Whisper, lightweight SLMs, wake-word detection, 3D point-cloud perception, depth estimation, thermal vision, or Visual-Language-Action 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 for quadrupedal and bipedal or humanoid robotic systems.
- Structure and lead technical co-development milestones and Joint Development Agreements with robotics manufacturers to support on-chassis hosting of Cisco intelligence containers, LLMs, and agent runtimes.
- Direct physical robot retrofits, mechanical bracket design, sensor integration, audio hardware integration, and RFID/NFC badging hardware integration.
- Design, deploy, and operationalize autonomous concierge robots in executive briefing facilities.
- Integrate conversational speech-to-speech AI, wake-word detection, multi-state LED 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 data centers.
- Build on-chassis edge machine-learning pipelines to detect potential failures in server cooling fans, power supplies, and mechanical bearings using directional acoustic listening.
- 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 authentication, Duo/Okta identity federation, zero-trust edge access controls, and edge data filtering that prevents 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 WPR, EHS, and local municipal fire authorities to establish lithium-ion battery containment, fire suppression protocols, and safety gating.
- Collaborate with GPS on preferred vendor onboarding, SSBR on outdoor perimeter pilots, Legal/IP on patent harvesting and JDA boundaries, and Outshift on joint robotics research.
Benefits
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance, subject to plan eligibility rules.
- 401(k) plan with Cisco matching contribution.
- Paid parental leave.
- Short- and long-term disability coverage.
- Basic life insurance.
- Potential eligibility for Cisco restricted stock unit grants, subject to continued employment and vesting terms.
- Paid holidays and a floating holiday for non-exempt employees.
- Paid birthday day off, year-end holiday shutdown, and personal wellness days.
- Vacation time or flexible vacation time off, depending on employee classification.
- Sick time off, including carryforward of unused sick time up to the stated limit.
- Additional paid time away may be requested for critical or emergency family-member issues.
- Optional paid volunteer days.
- Annual bonus eligibility for non-sales roles, subject to Cisco policies.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Director
