# Principal Machine Learning Engineer at Cisco

- Company: Cisco
- What the company does: Cisco is a worldwide technology leader powering an inclusive future for all. Learn more about our products, services, solutions, and innovations. Backed by Sequoia and Menlo.
- Company website: https://www.cisco.com/
- Type: Startups (AI role)
- Level: Principal and up
- Location: San Jose, California, US
- Work setup: On-site
- Posted: 2026-10-15
- Apply by: 2026-11-29
- Apply: https://cisco.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Cisco_Careers/job/San-Jose-California-US/Principal-Machine-Learning-Engineer_2025206-1?utm_source=1752vc&utm_medium=careers
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/cisco-principal-machine-learning-engineer/

## About the role

As a Principal Machine Learning Engineer on Cisco’s CX AI Incubation and Agents team, you tackle ambiguous, high-impact challenges and lead cross-functional engagements from architecture and design through production and customer deployment. You will serve as the architectural and technical authority for designing, building, and scaling the AI foundation powering Cisco IQ and evolving customer needs. As a hands-on technical leader, you will design and build AI systems for production scale. Found on 1752vc Careers, the job board for startup and VC roles.

## What they're looking for

- Bachelors + 14 years of related experience, or Masters + 11 years of related experience, or PhD + 7 years of related experience
- Experience developing, fine-tuning, and optimizing models in Python, PyTorch or JAX, using techniques such as PEFT or LoRA, quantization, and distillation
- Experience architecting and deploying production LLM and/or SLM inference runtimes optimized with continuous batching, KV-cache management, or speculative decoding
- Experience architecting and deploying production RAG systems and agentic workflows using vector databases
- Experience designing and implementing automated evaluation frameworks for AI systems, including golden test datasets, LLM-as-a-judge methodologies, drift detection, and/or CI/CD regression gates
- Experience architecting production AI platform APIs featuring robust quota management, versioning, and deployment across hybrid cloud and air-gapped environments


Source: 1752vc Careers, https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/cisco-principal-machine-learning-engineer/