Director - AI Research and Engineering Efficiency (Circuit Platform)

Cisco

Remote Actively hiring Posted this week Verified listing
San Jose, CA Posted 2 days ago Apply by Jun 19, 2026 $291,500–$369,100 / year
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99+ other roles within 25 mi Near San Jose, CA

Market check

Salary context

Above market

How this pay compares to similar roles

Similar $226k
This role $330k
$162k most similar roles pay here $391k

This role pays more than 96% of similar roles. Most pay $197,687–$254,950 — the shaded band above. At the midpoint, this role pays about $330k versus about $226k for comparable roles.

Based on 240 similar postings.

Employer

About Cisco

Cisco Systems is the world''s leading networking technology company, designing and manufacturing networking hardware, telecommunications equipment, and cybersecurity solutions for businesses and governments. Industry: Networking Technology & Cybersecurity

Cisco currently has 134 open roles on FindRole.

Listed pay typically runs $168,800–$241,400 across 134 roles with salary data.

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At a glance

TL;DR

Join Cisco's AI Platforms and Enablement team as a Principal Engineer or Distinguished Engineer, leading the development of CIRCUIT, an enterprise-wide AI platform designed to enhance productivity by collapsing information silos. You will mentor a specialized team, architect high-quality systems, and define strategies for model evaluation and deployment at scale. Key responsibilities include building robust agentic system architecture, optimizing model-serving efficiency, and establishing technical standards for secure, observable AI agents. The role demands deep expertise in AI/ML systems, distributed platform design, and production software engineering practices. Ideal candidates have extensive experience with enterprise-scale LLMs, SLMs, and agent runtimes, proficiency in the full AI lifecycle, and a track record of translating research into scalable platforms. This position requires 15+ years of relevant experience and a strong background in computer science or related fields, with a preference for advanced degrees and senior leadership roles in AI/ML or distributed systems.

Skills

LLM SLM AI/ML Kubernetes TensorRT-LLM Ray Docker Python PostgreSQL CI/CD Prometheus Grafana AWS Azure Google Cloud Platform Terraform Git Jenkins GitHub Docker Swarm Ansible Kafka Redis MongoDB Elasticsearch Kibana OpenSearch CICD Model Serving LLM Evaluation Agentic Systems Enterprise AI Governance

What you'll do

  • Define and architect Cisco-scale agentic system architecture for secure, scalable AI.
  • Build evaluation harnesses for models, prompts, RAG systems, tools, agents, and multi-agent workflows.
  • Own the strategy for frontier models, including vendor-hosted and self-hosted options.
  • Drive model-serving efficiency through routing, batching, caching, quantization, distillation, context optimization, and serving-stack improvements.
  • Translate AI research breakthroughs into production-grade capabilities and validated improvements to CIRCUIT.

What we're looking for

  • 15+ years of experience in software engineering, systems architecture, machine learning, AI platforms, or distributed systems.
  • Experience architecting and operating production LLMs, 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 workflows.
  • Deep expertise in AI/ML systems, model deployment, distributed platform design, and production software engineering practices.
  • Prior experience driving platform strategy and technical innovation at enterprise scale.
  • Strong understanding of enterprise AI security, policy enforcement, data privacy, and governance.

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