Principal Machine Learning Engineer

Cisco • San Jose, CA

5d • Hybrid

About The Position

Cisco’s CX AI Incubation and Agents team develops the foundational AI platform behind intelligent customer experiences across Cisco. The shared platform supports application and agent teams in cloud, on-premises, and fully air-gapped customer environments. Its work includes AI-native platforms, model and inference layers, evaluation systems, agentic and orchestration infrastructure, foundational AI services and APIs, and packaging and upgrade capabilities, alongside solutions in delivery intelligence, network automation, and edge computing. The team works across classical machine learning, domain-specific language models, and Agentic AI.

As Principal Machine Learning Engineer, you will lead ambiguous, high-impact, cross-functional work from architecture and design through production and customer deployment. You will serve as an architectural and technical authority for designing, building, and scaling the AI foundation that powers Cisco IQ and supports evolving customer needs. This is a hands-on technical leadership role focused on production-scale AI systems and setting standards for system design, platform governance, and technical excellence across the CX engineering ecosystem.

The role is hybrid, with three days per week on site in San Jose, California. The application window is expected to close on December 23, 2026.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree and 14 years of related experience, or master’s degree and 11 years of related experience, or Ph.D. and 7 years of related experience.
• Experience developing, fine-tuning, and optimizing models in Python using PyTorch or JAX, including techniques such as PEFT or LoRA, quantization, and distillation.
• Experience architecting and deploying production LLM and/or SLM inference runtimes optimized with continuous batching, KV-cache management, or speculative decoding.
• Experience architecting and deploying production RAG systems and agentic workflows using vector databases.
• Experience designing and implementing automated evaluation frameworks for AI systems, including golden test datasets, LLM-as-a-judge methodologies, drift detection, and/or CI/CD regression gates.
• Experience architecting production AI platform APIs featuring robust quota management and versioning, with deployment across hybrid cloud and air-gapped environments.

Nice To Haves

• Recognized industry contributions through publications, patents, conference presentations, or core contributions to open-source AI/ML projects.
• Hands-on experience optimizing inference workloads for resource-constrained compute environments, including CPU, NPU, small GPU footprints, and on-premises hardware appliances.

Responsibilities

• Design and build robust, multi-tenant AI services with scalable APIs, versioning, backward compatibility, and quota management across cloud, on-premises, and air-gapped environments.
• Select, evaluate, and implement models, frameworks, inference runtimes, and orchestration technologies.
• Translate emerging AI capabilities into production architectures optimized for scalability, latency, memory, and compute across GPU, CPU, and edge environments.
• Design and implement cost optimization across workloads through improved token efficiency, model selection, inference performance, and compute utilization.
• Establish measurable engineering standards for cost efficiency.
• Lead architecture and design reviews and resolve complex technical trade-offs.
• Mentor senior engineers and influence platform direction through hands-on technical leadership and execution.
• Lead cross-functional engagements from architecture and design through production and customer deployment.
• Design, build, and scale the AI foundation powering Cisco IQ and evolving customer needs.

Benefits

• Medical insurance
• Dental insurance
• Vision insurance
• 401(k) plan with Cisco matching contribution
• Paid parental leave
• Short- and long-term disability coverage
• Basic life insurance
• Paid holidays
• Floating holiday for non-exempt employees
• Paid birthday day off
• Paid year-end holiday shutdown
• 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 for eligible non-sales employees
• Potential grants of Cisco restricted stock units

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal