AI Safety & Reasoning Engineer (Reasoning Transparency)

Meet the Team

Join Cisco’s Enterprise AI team, the core group enabling Generative AI powered experiences across Cisco. Our mission is to build secure, scalable AI platforms that empower teams to safely develop, deploy, and operationalize AI-powered solutions. We operate at the intersection of applied AI, cloud infrastructure, and security, partnering across engineering, security, compliance, and product teams to bring trusted AI to life at enterprise scale. We are a fast-growing, highly collaborative team of platform engineers, AI engineers, and data scientists who value technical depth, ownership, and pragmatic execution. What makes this team exciting is the opportunity to define how secure Generative AI is built and governed inside a global technology leader. In this role, you will connect AI safety research with production engineering. You will develop methods and infrastructure to assess whether model behavior reflects its internal state, and help ensure deployed AI systems remain reliable, honest, and aligned as they use increasingly complex inference-time computation.

Your Impact You will operationalize transparency by translating concepts from mechanistic interpretability and eliciting knowledge into scalable pipelines that run alongside model inference. You will build infrastructure to extract, map, and interpret model activations and latent representations, supporting analysis of how internal signals relate to model outputs. You will design red-teaming frameworks and automated behavioral auditing stress tests to identify misalignment, sycophancy, deceptive behavior, and coordination risks across models or agents. You will partner with ML engineering to integrate transparency probes while managing inference latency, memory use, reliability, and operational cost. Additionally, you will track relevant AI safety research to rapidly prototype, evaluate, and deploy promising transparency methods, while defining evaluation methods to communicate evidence, limitations, and actionable findings to research, engineering, and product partners.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelors + 7 years of related experience, or Masters + 4 years of related experience, or PhD + 1 year of related experience, or equivalent related work experience
• Hands-on experience deploying or operating machine learning models in a production or production-like environment using Python.
• Demonstrated ability to conduct rigorous empirical work and communicate technical results, assumptions, and limitations to cross-functional collaborators.
• Practical understanding of transformer-based language models, inference-time computation, and alignment approaches such as RLHF or RLAIF.
• Proficiency in building evaluation frameworks that utilize adversarial prompt engineering to probe model limits and ensure model reliability and safety.

Preferred Qualifications

• High proficiency in Python frameworks, including experience building performant code for distributed training or high-throughput inference environments.
• Hands-on experience probing, mapping, or analyzing model activations, circuits, representations, or other internal states.
• Experience deploying and operating ML pipelines with container orchestration such as Kubernetes, CI/CD tools, and model tracking tools.
• Experience applying information security principles or structured threat modeling to AI systems, model infrastructure, or sensitive data.
• Familiarity with methods for eliciting model knowledge or beliefs and evaluating cases where stated outputs may diverge from internal signals.

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.