Senior AI Researcher
Meet the TeamAt Foundation AI, we are leading frontier AI research across Cisco. Our mission is to advance the state of artificial intelligence through fundamental research and translate scientific breakthroughs into differentiated technologies that power the next generation of enterprise AI.Our research spans foundation models, agentic AI, multimodal learning, reasoning systems, scalable training algorithms, evaluation science, inference optimization, and AI systems infrastructure. We work at the intersection of cutting-edge research and real-world impact, developing technologies that influence Cisco's AI strategy while contributing meaningfully to the broader AI research community.We believe impactful research should advance both science and products. Our researchers publish at top AI conferences, contribute to open-source projects, collaborate with leading academic institutions, and build production systems that solve challenging enterprise-scale problems.Your ImpactAs a Senior AI Researcher you will operate as a visionary technical leader, architecting and executing frontier AI research that dictates Foundation AI's long-term technical trajectory.You will identify emerging research opportunities, formulate original research hypotheses, and lead ambitious research programs spanning foundation models, agentic AI, reasoning, multimodal learning, and large-scale AI systems. Working closely with engineering and product team members, you will translate scientific advances into scalable technologies that differentiate Cisco's AI platform.Working at the highest technical levels, you will translate scientific advances into scalable paradigms that fundamentally differentiate Cisco's AI platform. Beyond individual technical contributions, you will provide scientific leadership across multiple research initiatives, mentor junior researchers and interns, and influence executive technical strategy. You will represent Cisco externally through top-tier publications, open-source leadership, and active collaboration with the global AI research community.Minimum QualificationsPhD in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or a related technical field, plus 5+ years of relevant research experience, or equivalent demonstrated research impact.Demonstrated track record of sustained, high-impact publications at top-tier machine learning and AI conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP, CVPR, ICCV, or equivalent venues).Demonstrated expertise in foundation models, post-training and alignment, LLMs, agentic AI, reinforcement learning, reasoning, efficient inference, or distributed training, evidenced by 5+ years of relevant research/engineering experience and/or multiple production-scale model deployments, publications, or open-source contributions.5+ years of hands-on Python and PyTorch experience, including training and optimizing models across multi-GPU or distributed environments and working with modern ML research and production f...