Principal Engineer

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.

Who We Are

We are a part of the Outshift Group focused on identifying breakthrough emerging solutions that create new markets and businesses for Cisco. We incubate these new opportunities in partnership with our business groups, partners, and other startups. The team also continues to progress Cisco’s important work with Standards bodies and manage research partnerships with leading-edge Universities.

Our organization is anticipating high growth. We are seeking talent with the agility and creativity to explore opportunities and fill in needs as they arise across our teams. Applicants should be seeking a flexible role, in which they not only provide leadership in their primary function, but also contribute in meaningful ways to other projects. We are looking for individuals who are excited about pivoting quickly to different domains that may be outside of their normal scope of responsibilities.

Learn more about us at

Who You'll Work With

The Outshift team is a highly visible group within Cisco. Outshift focuses on the next wave of innovation by anticipating, investing in, and incubating new technologies and business ventures. You will be part of the incubation team to develop new products and bring them to market in a startup-like environment.

What You'll Do

In this role, you will work in an innovative team, apply, and advance powerful AI technologies in products that make tangible business impacts, create the latest AI-powered user experiences on various platforms, work alongside a committed generative AI product management, software engineering teams gain expertise in the most in-demand AI domains for the future, and contribute to shaping Cisco’s AI strategies for the next decade.

We are building a core dedicated team specialized in applied deep learning in Large Language Models (LLM) and Generative AI, with high visibility to senior leadership and influence on company-wide businesses in this pioneering AI area. We are looking for candidates who are passionate about building innovative technologies to solve real-world problems and have an outstanding technical background in LLMs, or alternately in deep learning, especially natural language processing and multimodal AI, to join our team.

The Impact You’ll Make

If you want the challenge of fast-paced growth, the satisfaction of seeing your thoughtful ideas come to life, and the pride in helping grow a best-in-class AI team, this is the place for you.

Your Responsibilities Will Include

. Drive the Generative AI strategy, adapt various Gen AI models for quality and performance for new products.

. Analyze data to discover patterns, design, develop, evaluate, validate, and build scalable ML models for deep learning and generative AI products

. Develop, implement, and optimize LLMs and generative AI technologies, including training/finetuning and computation optimizations

. Conduct research and development into innovative AI/ML/Gen AI models using state-of-the-art tools and techniques, develop new algorithms and systems for reasoning using text, image, video, audio, and multimodal inputs.

. Collaborate with product managers to understand business requirements, and work with peer engineers and scientists to build prototypes

. Collaborate with software engineers to deploy LLM and other Generative AI models into production environments.

. Stay up to date with the latest advancements in the field of Generative AI

. Test and integrate successful models and algorithms into production systems that operate at very large scale

. Mentor applied scientists and engineers globally and holding Outshift to a high standard of technical rigor and excellence in AI

. Be an enthusiastic and self-motivated collaborator with a can-do attitude 

. Be a product evangelist – engage directly with customers and partners, participate, and present in external events and conferences

Minimum Requirements

. Hands-on experience developing, implementing, and optimizing large language models and generative AI technologies, including training/finetuning and computation optimizations.

. Understanding and hands-on experience in natural language processing, computer vision, and multimodal interaction

. Design and build solutions to help customers reach successful pilots, PoCs and production deployments with generative AI and data science technologies. 

. Consolidate learnings from these strategic engagements and present to the inbound product management teams to improve their products and platforms

. PhD degree and 10+ years, or Master’s degree and 15+ years in CS, CE, ML, or related fields with a consistent track record of developing and delivering models for enterprise class products that created successful business outcomes.

. 7+ years of experience in Java, C++, Python (or related languages) and hands-on experience with deep learning frameworks

Preferred Skills

. Publications in top-tier deep learning conferences or significant contributions to prominent deep learning repositories

. Practical experience in system design, software development, and production deployment

. Excel in transforming ambiguous requirements into actionable plans with deep learning techniques for problem-solving

. Familiarity with the latest advancements in computer vision and multimodal modeling such as CLIP, DALL-E2, and diffusion models

. Top-tier performance in prestigious deep learning leaderboards or large model-related competitions. 

. Having an impressive set of GitHub projects or contributions to open-source technologies

. Strong problem-solving skills and ability to work independently or in a team

. PhD in machine learning, data science, engineering, computer science, mathematics, statistics, or highly quantitative field

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