Director Jobs

About The Position

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, AI/ML, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 15+ years or a PhD with 10+ years of combined experience in software engineering, systems architecture, machine learning, AI platforms or distributed systems.
• Experience architecting or operating production LLM, agentic AI, model-serving, or applied AI systems at enterprise scale.
• Demonstrated ability to build or lead evaluation systems for LLMs, RAG pipelines, tools, autonomous agents, or model-powered enterprise workflows.
• Experience with model efficiency techniques such as model routing, caching, quantization, distillation, prompt/context optimization, batching, or high-throughput inference serving or similar work.
• Deep expertise in AI/ML systems, model deployment, distributed platform design, applied AI architecture, and production software engineering practices.
• Prior experience driving platform strategy and technical innovation at enterprise scale.
• Demonstrated experience influencing product, engineering, security, infrastructure, and leadership organizations through technical strategy, architecture reviews, prototypes, and measurable platform outcomes.

Nice To Haves

• Advanced degree or equivalent experience (Master's or PhD) in Computer Science, AI/ML, Systems Engineering, or a related field.
• Demonstrated excellence in a Principal Engineer, Distinguished Engineer, Director, or equivalent senior technical leadership role within AI/ML, distributed systems, or enterprise platforms.
• Deep expertise in enterprise AI platforms, LLMs, SLMs, agentic systems, and model-serving architectures (e.g., vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, Ray, Kubernetes-based GPU platforms).
• Proficiency in the full AI lifecycle, including model training, fine-tuning (LoRA/QLoRA), routing, compression, quantization, and inference optimization.
• Extensive experience with agent runtimes, orchestration, tool-calling, human-in-the-loop workflows, memory management, and observability.
• Proven ability to build rigorous evaluation frameworks, including golden datasets, adversarial testing, online experimentation, and release gates.
• Strong understanding of enterprise AI security, policy enforcement, data privacy, and production-grade governance.
• Demonstrated success in delivering complex AI business applications and translating powerful research into scalable, production-grade platform capabilities.

Responsibilities

• Direct, mentor, and work alongside a specialized team of AI practitioners.
• Contribute to architecture, code reviews, model evaluations, prototype implementations, and technical design decisions to ensure high-quality outcomes.
• Define Cisco-scale agentic system architecture, including planning, tool execution, agent-to-agent handoffs, memory, persistent state, human approval, policy enforcement, secure tool access, observability, and failure recovery.
• Build rigorous evaluation harnesses for models, prompts, RAG systems, tools, agents, and multi-agent workflows.
• Establish offline and online metrics for task success, tool-call accuracy, groundedness, hallucination rate, safety, latency, and cost.
• Own the strategy for frontier models, open-weight LLMs, SLMs, fine-tuned domain models, distilled models, and model routers.
• Define when Cisco should use vendor-hosted models, self-hosted models, fine-tuned models, or task-specific small models.
• Continuously benchmark emerging LLMs, SLMs, and Agent Harnesses.
• Lead fine-tuning of open-weight models to meet Cisco's security, domain, latency, cost, and quality requirements.
• Drive model-serving efficiency through routing, batching, caching, quantization, distillation, context optimization, structured outputs, and serving-stack improvements.
• Own cost-quality-latency tradeoffs across production AI workloads.
• Track breakthroughs in AI research and translate them into production-grade capabilities, reusable platform primitives, and validated improvements to CIRCUIT.
• Establish technical standards for secure, observable, auditable, policy-compliant AI agents operating over Cisco enterprise data and systems.
• Accelerate internal AI development through better tooling, reusable agent patterns, evaluation frameworks, deployment pipelines, and AI-assisted engineering workflows.
• Operate at the highest levels of Cisco’s internal AI infrastructure, managing significant platform scale, high-volume inference, and complex enterprise requirements.
• Own the optimization of a substantial annual model spend portfolio, drive critical reliability targets (p95/p99 latency, groundedness), and lead a multidisciplinary team of researchers and engineers.
• Set the technical AI strategy in partnership with VP/SVP-level leadership across engineering, product, and security.
• Be measured on your ability to drive tangible improvements in AI productivity (hours saved, workflow cycle-time reduction), agent reliability (task completion rates, reduction in human overrides), model quality (groundedness, hallucination reduction), inference economics (cost per successful task, GPU utilization), and developer velocity (time-to-production, evaluation coverage).

Benefits

• medical, dental and vision insurance
• a 401(k) plan with a Cisco matching contribution
• paid parental leave
• short and long-term disability coverage
• basic life insurance
• grants of Cisco restricted stock units
• 10 paid holidays per full calendar year
• 1 floating holiday for non-exempt employees
• 1 paid day off for employee’s birthday
• paid year-end holiday shutdown
• 4 paid days off for personal wellness
• 16 days of paid vacation time per full calendar year (non-exempt)
• flexible vacation time off program (exempt)
• 80 hours of sick time off provided on hire date and each January 1st thereafter
• up to 80 hours of unused sick time carried forward
• 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
• annual bonuses (for non-sales roles)
• performance-based incentive pay (for sales roles)