Sr AI/ML Software Engineer

Cisco•Milpitas, CA

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

Senior AI/ML Engineer to architect and build agentic AI systems and the MCP (Model Context Protocol) server layer that securely exposes enterprise tools, knowledge, and actions to LLM agents. You’ll lead the end-to-end lifecycle of ML applications from data and modeling to deployment, observability, and safety while setting platform standards for reliability, security, and developer experience.

Requirements

BS/MS in Computer Science, Data Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, or related technical field.
7+ years of industry experience delivering production AI/ML systems or developer platforms at scale.
Experience with Python, plus one of the following: Go/Java/C++/Rust.
Experience building agentic AI systems (tool-using agents, autonomous workflows, decision/action pipelines).
Hands-on experience designing, implementing, and operating MCP servers (capabilities, sessions, schemas, secure integrations).
Knowledge of LLMs & GenAI: prompting, RAG, vector search, fine-tuning/LoRA, safety/guardrails, evaluation.
Production experience with cloud (Azure/AWS/GCP), Docker/Kubernetes, CI/CD, and observability (metrics, tracing, logging).

Nice To Haves

Shipped enterprise-grade MCP servers integrating internal tools and external SaaS.
Experience with LangChain, Semantic Kernel, or agent frameworks; Hugging Face Transformers, PyTorch/TensorFlow/JAX.
Retrieval systems & vector DBs (FAISS, Milvus, Weaviate, Pinecone); hybrid search and embedding strategies.
Strong data engineering background: streaming/batch (Kafka/Kinesis/Pub/Sub; Spark/Beam), SQL/NoSQL, data lakes/warehouses.
Security & governance: OAuth/OIDC, secrets management, KMS, RBAC/ABAC, SOC 2/ISO 27001, GDPR/CCPA familiarity.
Contributions to open-source in LLM tooling, agent frameworks, or retrieval/search.

Benefits

medical, dental and vision insurance
a 401(k) plan with a Cisco matching contribution
paid parental leave
short and long-term disability coverage
basic life insurance
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, and 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
Optional 10 paid days per full calendar year to volunteer