Cisco · 3 days ago
Staff Applied Scientist
San Jose, CA
Full-time
Hybrid
Senior Level, Lead/Staff
$212K/yr - $276K/yr
2+ years expCisco is revolutionizing how data and infrastructure connect and protect organizations in the AI era. As a Staff Applied Scientist, you will design and deploy advanced AI models for intelligent code generation, enhance developer experiences, and collaborate with engineering and product teams to align research outcomes with customer needs.
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Responsibilities
Design, build, and deploy advanced AI models for intelligent code generation, contributing across model architecture, experimentation, evaluation, and integration into production systems
Push the boundaries of agentic GenAI by developing models that not only generate code but also reason, plan, self-correct, and interact with tools, APIs, and execution environments to improve reliability and usability
Enhance code-generation capabilities for DSLs and structured languages, helping shape the next generation of developer experiences powered by LLMs in both interactive and automated workflows
Optimize training and inference workflows through efficient data pipelines, distributed training strategies, and model-level performance improvements to ensure low latency, high accuracy, and cost-effectiveness
Partner closely with engineering and product teams to ensure research outcomes are aligned with customer needs and translate into scalable, high-impact product features
Contribute to the scientific culture of the team, sharing best practices in rigorous experimentation, reproducibility, evaluation design, and documentation
Participate in long-term AI innovation by identifying emerging opportunities, proposing new directions, and shaping roadmap priorities in collaboration with research and engineering leaders
Qualification
Required
PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, or a related technical field with 2+ years of industry or post-doctoral research experience; or a Master's degree with 6+ years of relevant applied ML or research experience
Demonstrated expertise in at least one of the following: Large language models for program synthesis, code understanding, or formal languages; Multi-step planning or agentic AI for developer workflows
Strong programming proficiency in Python and hands-on experience with deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow
Experience translating research prototypes into production systems, including deployment, optimization, and performance evaluation
Working knowledge of experimental design, benchmarking, reproducibility, evaluation metrics, and scientific documentation
Preferred
Experience training, fine-tuning, or adapting models such as Code-LLaMA, CodeT5, StarCoder, or GPT-based code models for program synthesis, bug fixing, refactoring, test generation, static/dynamic analysis, or domain-specific languages (DSLs)
Experience building models for structured languages such as SQL, DSLs, configuration languages, or proprietary query/automation languages
Experience developing systems where models plan, call tools/APIs, self-correct, or execute code iteratively to improve output quality
Familiarity with techniques such as chain-of-thought prompting, constrained decoding, self-debugging, or reinforcement learning for code-centric tasks
Experience with distributed training or inference optimization (quantization, LoRA, batching, caching) to improve latency, cost, and accuracy trade-offs
Exposure to automated retraining, dataset versioning/curation, evaluation harnesses, and reliability monitoring for ML models in production
Publications in top AI/ML venues (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, AAAI, KDD) and/or meaningful contributions to the LLM/code-gen research community (open-source, tools, datasets, or benchmarks)
Benefits
Medical, dental and vision insurance
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
4 paid days off for personal wellness determined by Cisco
16 days of paid vacation time per full calendar year, accrued at rate of 4.92 hours per pay period for full-time employees
Flexible vacation time off program, which has no defined limit on how much vacation time eligible employees may use
80 hours of sick time off provided on hire date and each January 1st thereafter
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
Annual bonuses subject to Cisco’s policies
Company
Cisco
Cisco develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, telecommunications equipment, and other technology services and products. It is a sub-organization of Cisco Press.
10001+ employees
H1B Sponsorship
Cisco has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (1238)
2024 (1231)
2023 (1273)
2022 (2127)
2021 (1991)
2020 (1173)
Funding
Current Stage
Public CompanyTotal Funding
unknown1990-02-13IPO
Leadership Team
Chuck Robbins
Chair and CEO
Carl Solder
Chief Technology Officer - Cisco System Australia/New Zealand
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