Principal Product Management Engineer

Meet the Team

The Cisco AI Software & Platform Group incubates and delivers mission-critical Generative AI and platform infrastructure across Cisco's global product portfolio. Our group builds foundational evaluation, benchmarking, and observability platforms that empower engineering teams to deploy autonomous AI agents and LLM-powered systems safely, reliably, and with verified accuracy at enterprise scale.

Your Impact

As an Engineering Product Manager you will lead the strategy, architecture, and organizational adoption of Cisco's end-to-end evaluation platform:

• Define AI Evaluation Platform Strategy: Architect the product vision, staged roadmap, and platform architecture for Cisco's unified offline benchmarking suites, automated LLM judges, and continuous production evaluation systems.

• Operationalize Quality & Safety Standards: Convert ambiguous quality standards (e.g., factual accuracy, hallucination mitigation, safety policies, agentic tool-use fidelity) into objective, repeatable test suites and structured human-in-the-loop review pipelines.

• Establish Release Gating & Quality Bars: Establish pre-deployment quality bars, risk-based release criteria, and automated regression-detection loops to govern AI model and application rollouts.

• Bridge Offline & Production Telemetry: Connect offline model evaluations directly with live telemetry, product analytics (Amplitude), and real-time user feedback loops to rapidly detect and remediate performance regressions.

• Drive Multi-Team Platform Adoption: Partner deeply with research scientists, engineering leaders, and product managers across business units to drive organization-wide adoption of standardized evaluation frameworks.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related technical field with 15+ years of product management experience, OR Master's degree with 12+ years, OR PhD with 8+ years of experience.

• Prior experience leading product management for AI/ML platforms, model evaluation frameworks, Large Language Model (LLM) infrastructure, or data-intensive software products.

• Experience designing and operationalizing offline benchmarking systems, automated evaluation judges, or real-time production quality monitoring pipelines.

• Previous experience defining risk-based launch criteria, release-gating frameworks, and regression mitigation workflows for software or AI systems.

• Experience driving multi-team platform adoption across matrixed engineering and product organizations.

Preferred Qualifications

• Direct experience evaluating Generative AI, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines, and autonomous multi-agent systems.

• Familiarity with modern AI evaluation toolkits (e.g., DeepEval, Ragas, LangSmith, TruLens) and enterprise telemetry architectures.

• Prior experience operating across enterprise SaaS, cloud infrastructure, or hyperscaler environments.

• Demonstrated background in statistical evaluation methodologies, automated LLM-as-a-judge calibration, and human-in-the-loop annotation workflows.

• Practical experience with online evals for agent systems: observing production traces and trajectories to diagnose failure patterns and decide which techniques to apply to make the agent work better.

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.