AI Researcher

Meet the Team

The AI Software & Platform Team delivers AI products so businesses around the world defend against threats and safeguard the most important aspects of business with security resilience. We are passionate about making businesses secure and simplifying security with zero compromise.

Who You Are

Join the Cisco AI Team, where you'll help design and develop intelligent systems that drive the next generation of AI-powered products. You'll work hands-on with machine learning models, data pipelines, and AI infrastructure to build solutions that are scalable, reliable, and impactful.

In this role, you'll collaborate with engineers, product managers, and researchers to move ideas from concept to implementation. You'll contribute to building and refining AI models, integrating them into products, and continuously improving their performance in real-world environments.

We're looking for someone who is technically strong, curious, and eager to work on meaningful AI-driven features. Experience with Python, ML frameworks, and data-centric development is important, along with a desire to grow and work collaboratively in a fast-paced, cross-functional environment.

This is an opportunity to help shape the future of AI at Cisco and beyond -developing responsible, innovative solutions that make a global impact.

What You Will Do

• Design, implement, and optimize machine learning models for NLP and multimodal (text, image, audio) data to solve key business challenges.
• Collaborate with senior engineers and architects to evaluate solution architectures, assess feasibility, and scope technical efforts.
• Develop and iterate on robust ML pipelines, including data preprocessing, feature extraction, model training, and deployment.
• Work cross-functionally with data scientists, ML engineers, and product teams to embed AI capabilities into customer-facing applications.
• Build and maintain scalable infrastructure for training and serving deep learning models across diverse data types.
• Fine-tune large language models (LLMs) and contribute to the design of agentic AI systems for interactive, context-aware use cases.
• Explore and apply techniques in representation learning, attention mechanisms, and multimodal fusion to improve model performance.
• Stay current with the latest research in NLP, vision-language models, and foundation model architectures, bringing insights into production work.
• Write clean, modular, and well-documented code following engineering best practices, and participate actively in code reviews and design discussions.
• Present technical solutions clearly to both technical peers and non-technical stakeholders, supporting data-driven decision-making.
• Support experimentation, A/B testing, and model performance evaluations in real-world settings.
• Contribute to internal knowledge sharing through demos, design reviews, and technical documentation.

Qualifications

• 3-6 years of experience in software development, with a strong focus on AI, machine learning, or deep learning projects across different data types (text, image, etc.).
• Hands-on experience building and deploying ML models or AI-driven features in real-world applications.
• Proven experience developing and supporting AI models in a production environment, including monitoring, performance tuning, and lifecycle management.
• Solid understanding of core machine learning algorithms, deep learning architectures (e.g., CNNs, RNNs, Transformers), and their practical applications.
• Proficiency in Python and experience with ML frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, or Keras.
• Strong analytical thinking and problem-solving abilities, with a focus on practical, scalable solutions.
• Comfortable working in cross-functional teams and communicating technical ideas clearly to peers and stakeholders.
• Exposure to MLOps or DataOps tools and workflows for managing models and data pipelines.
• Experience working within Agile development teams and familiarity with DevOps concepts.
• Self-motivated, curious, and eager to stay up to date with the latest advancements in AI and related technologies.

Preferred Qualifications

• A BS, MS or PhD degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning / Mathematics / Data Science or equivalent work experience in a field utilizing the same subject matter
• Passion for exploring LLM and agentic AI systems, and uncovering vulnerabilities like prompt injection and jailbreaking.