Engineering Product Manager

Cisco Systems, Inc.•San Jose, CA

35d

About The Position

The Cisco AI Software & Platform Group incubates and delivers Generative AI based solutions to reinvent Cisco's existing products and how customers interact with them. You will join a motivated platform team collaborating across Cisco. We ship iteratively, measure outcomes, and focus on customer and partner time-to-value. You will work closely with Engineering, Design, Data/AI, Customer Experience, Sales, and Strategy teams, as well as external technology partners. As an Engineering Product Manager specializing in Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs), you will be instrumental in shaping the future of Cisco's AI-powered products and platforms. You will own the end-to-end product vision, strategy, and roadmap for the evaluation framework powering Cisco's Gen AI platform. By partnering with ML researchers, you will bring cutting-edge research and new benchmarks into Cisco, building robust evaluation systems that gate model releases. You will collaborate closely with internal teams to understand their needs, build consensus on metrics and baselines, and establish clear mechanisms for sharing evaluation results with leadership and partners. Working alongside other PMs, you will leverage insights from alpha, beta, and GA programs to drive objective, data-driven decisions. You will also experiment with innovative approaches to creating and maintaining high-quality evaluation sets, productizing the most promising methods. Additionally, you will ensure that our evaluation frameworks meet all regulatory requirements by working with legal and safety teams

Requirements

7+ years in product management (or equivalent), including experience with platform or cross-portfolio products.
3+ years building AI-powered product experiences such as AI assistants, recommender systems, or AI automation.
Demonstrable experience converting research papers into products.
Familiarity with Agentic AI and protocols like MCP and A2A.
Strong collaboration skills across engineering, design, CX, sales, partners, and executive forums.

Nice To Haves

2+ years building technical AI products such as MLOps, Evaluation Frameworks, Training/Fine-tuning Pipelines, Retrieval Augmented Generation.
1+ year hands-on experience working with foundation models and their applications.
Deep understanding of the Gen AI evaluation space including public benchmarks, datasets, and their pros and cons.
Strong communication and storytelling skills, especially while communicating numbers and metrics; ability to simplify complexity for executive and customer audiences.

Responsibilities

Own the end-to-end product vision, strategy, and roadmap for evaluation framework for Cisco's Gen AI platform.
Partner with ML researchers to bring cutting-edge research such as papers, new benchmarks, etc. to Cisco and build release gating evaluation systems.
Work closely with internal Cisco teams to understand their eval requirements and to build consensus on metrics, their measurement, and baselines.
Establish mechanisms on sharing evals with leadership and partners (e.g. model cards)
Collaborate with other PMs to gather data from alpha, beta, and GA programs and drive objective decision making.
Experiment with innovative approaches to building and maintaining high quality eval sets and productizing the promising ones.
Work with legal and safety teams to ensure that evals meet regulatory requirements like the EU AI Act, etc.

Benefits

U.S. employees are offered benefits, subject to Cisco's plan eligibility rules, which include medical, dental and vision insurance, a 401(k) plan with a Cisco matching contribution, paid parental leave, short and long-term disability coverage, and basic life insurance.
Employees may be eligible to receive grants of Cisco restricted stock units, which vest following continued employment with Cisco for defined periods of time.
10 paid holidays per full calendar year, plus 1 floating holiday for non-exempt employees
1 paid day off for employee's birthday, paid year-end holiday shutdown, and 4 paid days off for personal wellness determined by Cisco
Non-exempt employees receive 16 days of paid vacation time per full calendar year, accrued at rate of 4.92 hours per pay period for full-time employees
Exempt employees participate in Cisco's flexible vacation time off program, which has no defined limit on how much vacation time eligible employees may use (subject to availability and some business limitations)
80 hours of sick time off provided on hire date and each January 1st thereafter, and up to 80 hours of unused sick time carried forward from one calendar year to the next
Additional paid time away may be requested to deal with critical or emergency issues for family members
Optional 10 paid days per full calendar year to volunteer
For non-sales roles, employees are also eligible to earn annual bonuses subject to Cisco's policies.