AI Research Scientist III (Full Time) – United States

Please note this posting is to advertise potential job opportunities. This exact role may not be open today but could open in the near future. When you apply, a Cisco representative may contact you directly if a relevant position opens.

Applications are accepted until further notice.

Meet the Team At Foundation AI, we are leading frontier AI research across Cisco. Our mission is to advance the state of AI. We translate that research into purpose-built models, agentic systems, new algorithms, optimization methods, and scalable data processing techniques that solve real-world problems at scale. We explore new model architectures, pre-training and post-training methods, inference optimization, evaluation techniques, and data pipelines. Together, we are advancing AI at Cisco and for the broader AI community!

Your Impact As an AI Researcher, you will work on the research, development, and deployment of advanced AI systems. Your focus will span large language models, agentic AI, multimodal learning, and enterprise-scale AI applications. We are looking for researchers who will help translate frontier research into practical systems by designing experiments, developing new methods, and turning research insights into impactful, scalable AI solutions. We are particularly interested in researchers with deep expertise in algorithm design for pre-training and post-training, scalable data curation, and reliable AI infrastructure. You will drive improvements to training algorithms, curate and optimize data at scale, and design infrastructure needed to train purpose-built models that can compete with frontier models on specific tasks aligned with Cisco's business priorities and Foundation AI's research agenda. We place a strong emphasis on publishing research and contributing meaningfully to the AI community. In this role, you will write scientific articles for top-tier machine learning and AI conferences, publish technical blog posts, and contribute to the open-source AI community! In this role, you will:

…