Director - AI Research and Engineering Efficiency (Circuit Platform) (San Jose)

The application window is expected to close on: 08/07/2026Job posting may be removed earlier if the position is filled or if a sufficient number of applications are received.Meet the TeamThe AI Platforms and Enablement team is the engine behind Cisco's internal AI transformation. Our mission is to build and scale CIRCUIT, Cisco's universal enterprise AI platform designed to collapse information silos and amplify productivity through intelligent, agentic experiences. As a team of researchers, engineers, and AI practitioners, we bridge the gap between powerful industry innovation and practical, production-grade applications.We provide the foundation for Cisco to reimagine work through secure, scalable AI, enabling business units to integrate proprietary data and transform legacy workflows into intelligent, autonomous systems. We value technical depth, rapid prototyping, applied research, production engineering field, and solving complex architectural challenges across models, agents, harnesses, inference efficiency, and enterprise AI governance.Your ImpactYou will direct, mentor, and work alongside a specialized team of AI practitioners. You will contribute to architecture, code reviews, model evaluations, prototype implementations, and technical design decisions to ensure high-quality outcomes.You will 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.You will build rigorous evaluation harnesses for models, prompts, RAG systems, tools, agents, and multi-agent workflows. You will establish offline and online metrics for task success, tool-call accuracy, groundedness, hallucination rate, safety, latency, and cost.You will own the strategy for frontier models, open-weight LLMs, SLMs, fine-tuned domain models, distilled models, and model routers. You will define when Cisco should use vendor-hosted models, self-hosted models, fine-tuned models, or task-specific small models.You will continuously benchmark emerging LLMs, SLMs, and Agent Harnesses. You will lead fine-tuning of open-weight models to meet Cisco's security, domain, latency, cost, and quality requirements.You will drive model-serving efficiency through routing, batching, caching, quantization, distillation, context optimization, structured outputs, and serving-stack improvements. You will own cost-quality-latency tradeoffs across production AI workloads.You will track breakthroughs in AI research and translate them into production-grade capabilities, reusable platform primitives, and validated improvements to CIRCUIT.You will establish technical standards for secure, observable, auditable, policy-compliant AI agents operating over Cisco enterprise data and systems.You will accelerate internal AI development through better tooling, reusable agent patterns, evaluation frameworks, deployment pipelines, and AI-assisted engineering workflows.You will operate at the highest levels of Cisco’s internal AI infrastructure, managing significant platform scale, high-volume inference, and complex enterprise requirements.You will 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. You will set the technical AI strategy in partnership with VP/SVP-level leadership across engineering, product, and security.You will 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).Minimum QualificationsBachelor'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.Preferred QualificationsAdvanced 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.Why Cisco? At Cisco, we’re revolutionizing how data and infrastructure connect and protect organizations in the AI era – and beyond. We’ve been innovating fearlessly for 40 years to create solutions that power how humans and technology work together across the physical and digital worlds. These solutions provide customers with unparalleled security, visibility, and insights across the entire digital footprint.Fueled by the depth and breadth of our technology, we experiment and create meaningful solutions. Add to that our worldwide network of doers and experts, and you’ll see that the opportunities to grow and build are limitless. We work as a team, collaborating with empathy to make really big things happen on a global scale. Because our solutions are everywhere, our impact is everywhere. We are Cisco, and our power starts with you. Message to applicants applying to work in the U.S. and/or Canada:The starting salary range posted for this position is $291,500.00 to $369,100.00 and reflects the projected salary range for new hires in this position in U.S. and/or Canada locations, not including incentive compensation*, equity, or benefits.Individual pay is determined by the candidate's hiring location, market conditions, job-related skillset, experience, qualifications, education, certifications, and/or training. The full salary range for certain locations is listed below. For locations not listed below, the recruiter can share more details about compensation for the role in your location during the hiring process.U.S. employees are offered benefits, subject to Cisco’s plan eligibility rules, which include medical, dental and vision insurance, a 401(k) plan with a Cisco matching contribution, paid parental leave, short and long-term disability coverage, and basic life insurance. Please see the Cisco careers site to discover more benefits and perks. Employees may be eligible to receive grants of Cisco restricted stock units, which vest following continued employment with Cisco for defined periods of time.U.S. employees are eligible for paid time away as described below, subject to Cisco’s policies:10 paid holidays per full calendar year, plus 1 floating holiday for non-exempt employees1 paid day off for employee’s birthday, paid year-end holiday shutdown, and 4 paid days off for personal wellness determined by CiscoNon-exempt employees** receive 16 days of paid vacation time per full calendar year, accrued at rate of 4.92 hours per pay period for full-time employeesExempt employees participate in Cisco’s flexible vacation time off program, which has no defined limit on how much vacation time eligible employees may use (subject to availability and some business limitations)80 hours of sick time off provided on hire date and each January 1st thereafter, and up to 80 hours of unused sick time carried forward from one calendar year to the nextAdditional paid time away may be requested to deal with critical or emergency issues for family membersOptional 10 paid days per full calendar year to volunteerFor non-sales roles, employees are also eligible to earn annual bonuses subject to Cisco’s policies.Employees on sales plans earn performance-based incentive pay on top of their base salary, which is split between quota and non-quota components, subject to the applicable Cisco plan. For quota-based incentive pay, Cisco typically pays as follows:.75% of incentive target for each 1% of revenue attainment up to 50% of quota;1.5% of incentive target for each 1% of attainment between 50% and 75%;1% of incentive target for each 1% of attainment between 75% and 100%; andOnce perfor