AI Infrastructure Technical Systems Engineer

Meet the Team

The Cisco IT AI Infrastructure team delivers high-performance compute (HPC) and accelerated AI infrastructure as a service across Cisco's global enterprise footprint. We provide foundational supercomputing platforms that empower engineering, research, security, and product teams. Our organization architects, builds, and operates the enterprise-grade supercomputing infrastructure that powers Cisco’s foundational models, distributed AI training, inference engines, and machine learning platforms.

Your Impact

As an AI Infrastructure Technical System Engineer and Technical Leader, you will serve as the principal systems architect and technical authority for our enterprise AI platforms. You will establish architectural direction, spearhead complex infrastructure initiatives, mentor engineering talent, and bridge accelerated hardware capabilities with high-performance software execution.

You will collaborate with a global multi-disciplinary team, interfacing regularly with internal AI Researchers, Cisco Hardware & Network Architecture Teams, and Industry Ecosystem Partners (NVIDIA, AMD, Red Hat) to engineer and operate a cutting-edge, large-scale AI technology stack.

Key Responsibilities

Architecture, Strategy & Capacity Engineering

• Lead the architectural design, hardware qualification, capacity planning, and maintenance of large-scale bare-metal GPU clusters (NVIDIA/AMD).
• Architect resilient, multi-tenant compute and control planes across bare-metal Kubernetes, enterprise container platforms (Red Hat OpenShift), and HPC cluster managers (NVIDIA BCM).
• Collaborate with network engineering to design, benchmark, and optimize high-throughput, low-latency backend fabrics (RDMA, RoCEv2, 400G/800G).

Infrastructure as Code (IaC), GitOps & SRE Automation

• Champion Site Reliability Engineering to eliminate operational toil, drive autonomous self-healing, and uphold stringent Service Level Objectives (SLOs).
• Architect IaC and GitOps deployment pipelines using Ansible, Terraform, Python, Go, and modern CI/CD tooling.
• Oversee automated workflows for firmware baselines, BIOS/BMC configuration, kernel driver updates, platform upgrades, and certificate rotations.

AI Workload Orchestration & Systems Performance

• Optimize distributed workload scheduling, fair-share queueing, and GPU quota governance across frameworks (Slurm, Kueue, Volcano, Ray).
• Profile low-level systems performance, diagnosing device interconnect bottlenecks, bandwidth utilization, memory hierarchies, and compute efficiency.
• Establish automated Day-2 diagnostics and recovery procedures for GPU degradation, driver anomalies, and hardware faults.

Observability, Governance & Technical Leadership

• Architect end-to-end observability standards using OpenTelemetry (OTel), Prometheus, and Splunk to deliver role-specific visualization dashboards and anomaly detectors.
• Serve as the senior escalation authority for high-impact incidents, leading root-cause analyses (RCAs) and aligning operations with ITIL frameworks.
• Author architecture blueprints and standard operating procedures (SOPs); mentor and coach mid-level and senior engineers to foster a culture of innovation.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, IT, or related discipline with 5 plus of progressive experience in enterprise systems engineering, HPC, AI infrastructure, or SRE.
• Proficiency in Python, Go, or Bash, with extensive experience building declarative automation (Ansible, Terraform, CI/CD, GitOps).
• Advanced expertise designing and administering production Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift, and HPC workload managers (Slurm, Kueue, Volcano, Ray).
• Strong hands-on understanding of AI backend network fabrics, RDMA technologies (RoCEv2), and high-speed multi-hundred-gigabit network topologies.
• In-depth knowledge of enterprise Linux (RHEL/Ubuntu), kernel module lifecycle, memory subsystems, GPU device drivers, and out-of-band management (Redfish, IPMI).

Preferred Qualifications

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline (or an additional 2+ years of equivalent specialized engineering experience).
• 3+ years of experience managing enterprise server platforms at scale (e.g., environments with 500+ nodes), including automated hardware provisioning and centralized infrastructure management solutions.
• 2+ years of hands-on experience deploying, troubleshooting, and optimizing heterogeneous GPU software stacks (e.g., NVIDIA CUDA, AMD ROCm) and executing GPU validation suites in production environments.
• 3+ years of experience designing and implementing enterprise secrets management architectures (e.g., HashiCorp Vault) and integrating identity federation protocols (OIDC, SAML, SSO) across multiple production applications.
• Possession of at least one active, current industry-recognized advanced certification (e.g., CKA/CKS, RHCA/RHCE, or advanced networking credentials).
• Demonstrable record of active contributions (e.g., verifiable authored commits, merged pull requests, or published technical documentation) to open-source infrastructure projects, Kubernetes SIGs, HPC scheduling communities, or telemetry frameworks.

Why Cisco? 

At Cisco, we’re revolutionizing how data and infrastructure connect and protect organizations in the AI era – and beyond. We’ve been innovating fearlessly for 40 years to create solutions that power how humans and technology work together across the physical and digital worlds. These solutions provide customers with unparalleled security, visibility, and insights across the entire digital footprint.

Fueled by the depth and breadth of our technology, we experiment and create meaningful solutions. Add to that our worldwide network of doers and experts, and you’ll see that the opportunities to grow and build are limitless. We work as a team, collaborating with empathy to make really big things happen on a global scale. Because our solutions are everywhere, our impact is everywhere. 

We are Cisco, and our power starts with you. 

Message to applicants applying to work in the U.S. and/or Canada:

Individual pay is determined by the candidate's hiring location, market conditions, job-related skillset, experience, qualifications, education, certifications, and/or training. The full salary range for certain locations is listed below. For locations not listed below, the recruiter can share more details about compensation for the role in your location during the hiring process.

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. Please see the Cisco careers site to discover more benefits and perks.  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, 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

• 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

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

Employees on sales plans earn performance-based incentive pay on top of their base salary, which is split between quota and non-quota components, subject to the applicable Cisco plan. For quota-based incentive pay, Cisco typically pays as follows:

• .75% of incentive target for each 1% of revenue attainment up to 50% of quota;

• 1.5% of incentive target for each 1% of attainment between 50% and 75%;

• 1% of incentive target for each 1% of attainment between 75% and 100%; and

• Once performance exceeds 100% attainment, incentive rates are at or above 1% for each 1% of attainment with no cap on incentive compensation.

For non-quota-based sales performance elements such as strategic sales objectives, Cisco may pay 0% up to 125% of target. Cisco sales plans do not have a minimum threshold of performance for sales incentive compensation to be paid.

The applicable full salary ranges for this position, by specific state, are listed below:

New York City Metro Area:

Non-Metro New York state & Washington state:

* For quota-based sales roles on Cisco’s sales plan, the ranges provided in this posting include base pay and sales target incentive compensation combined.

** Employees in Illinois, whether exempt or non-exempt, will participate in a unique time off program to meet local requirements.