AI Engineering Technical Leader

About the Role

The Cisco IT team is changing the way we run Cisco's operations by leveraging the power of technology, the best of business processes, and utilizing outstanding data insights. We are redefining how Cisco designs and delivers the employee, partner, and customer experience based on a culture that values customer service. We strive for speed and agility in all that we do. Above all else, we are kind to each other. We aspire to be an industry-leading IT team, with a strong focus on AI and security to differentiate us and foster innovation. To achieve simplicity and the best employee and customer experience, we need excellent talent and the right abilities to succeed.

Who You'll Work With

You will work with our amazing Enterprise Data & Platforms team as part of Cisco IT organization. You will build solutions and support them across our portfolio of capabilities, primarily focusing on enabling AI/ML and Generative AI capabilities in a multi-functional team setup. You will collaborate with other engineers, architects, and organization leadership.

Who You Are

We are looking for a highly skilled AI Engineering Technical Leader to lead the deployment and management of Gen AI based applications and services, with a focus on Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and Agentic AI. This role requires expertise in developing and supporting large-scale GenAI applications, with a strong emphasis on AI-first engineering. The successful candidate will have extensive experience in responsible AI practices, including toxicity screening and ensuring regulatory compliance across AI solutions.

What You'll Do

• Design, develop, and optimize high-performance, scalable Generative AI frameworks for on-premise and cloud environments.
• Architect secure workflows for end-to-end document processing, including ingestion, classification, retrieval, and automated fine-tuning pipelines.
• Implement robust data security, encryption, and access control protocols to ensure compliance with organizational and regulatory standards.
• Integrate responsible AI practices, including toxicity screening, bias detection, and ethical auditing, to ensure safe and compliant model deployment.
• Collaborate with cross-functional, legal, and governance teams to maintain alignment with evolving privacy and security frameworks.
• Monitor and maintain AI infrastructure with real-time alerting to ensure system stability and performance.
• Stay current with advancements in Generative AI, document security, and ethical AI development to drive continuous infrastructure improvement.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related STEM field.
• 3+ years hands-on experience in Gen AI engineering on production use cases.
• Proficiency in software engineering best practices, design and development of containerized large-scale distributed applications, and use of DevOps and CI/CD tools.
• Proficiency in Python programming language or similar.
• Hands-on experience with Gen AI frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, LangSmith, AI operators, with proficiency in Python for AI operations.
• Experience with vector databases, such as Weaviate, Pinecone, Milvus or similar.

Preferred Qualifications

• Master's Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related STEM field.
• Experience with design and development of advanced Agentic AI workflows orchestration.

Pay

The starting salary range for this position is $180,900.00 to $229,000.00 and reflects the projected salary range for new hires 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.

For non-sales roles, employees are also eligible to earn annual bonuses subject to Cisco's policies.

Full salary ranges by specific state:

• New York City Metro Area: $212,300.00 - $317,100.00
• Non-Metro New York State & Washington State: $193,800.00 - $282,100.00

Benefits

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. 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 employees
• 1 paid day off for employee's birthday
• Paid year-end holiday shutdown
• 4 paid days off for personal wellness determined by Cisco
• Non-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 employees
• Exempt 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 next
• Additional paid time away may be requested to deal with critical or emergency issues for family members
• Optional 10 paid days per full calendar year to volunteer