Senior Technical Leader, NLP

The application window is expected to close on: 7/31/2025.

Job posting may be removed earlier if the position is filled or if a sufficient number of applications are received.

Cisco Webex is the world's #1 business collaboration and customer engagement platform. It is used across all industries in the world being used to support governments, business, education, and more, including use by 85% of Fortune 500 business.

The workplace of the future will be powered by AI, and we, Collaboration AI, is the team responsible for building AI/ML intelligent experiences within Cisco's Webex portfolio. The team is made up of multiple major AI fronts to enrich the collaboration use cases. This, in the order of processing pipeline, includes audio codec technologies, automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS), natural language processing (NLP) using and training LLMs and beyond, and gen-AI evaluation methodologies, both metric-based and subjective testing. In addition, videos are empowered via computer vision (CV) and additional contextual information by employee graphs, and much more.

We aim to build the next-generation AI solutions in collaboration software, devices, and APIs - from digitizing the in-meeting experience, enhancing distributed team efficiency and improving all aspects of people connection.

As a Senior Machine Learning Technical Leader on the Collaboration AI team, you will be the owner of part of team's AI initiatives end-to-end. You will also be expected to propose strategies to facilitate the team's productivity both from technical and organizational perspectives.

You will engage in NLP/LLM applied research within a practical setting to develop innovative LLM applications for Webex across the portfolio. This includes, but not limited to, the following responsibilities:

• Seek opportunities that employ next-generation LLM technologies, particularly in areas such as retrieval-augmented generation, AI agents, agentic workflows, and more.
• Establish benchmarking methods, collaborate with both in-domain and cross-domain ML experts, and demonstrate project value through prototyping.
• Work with systems engineers, product managers, and cross-team client engineers to facilitate productization. Your expertise in algorithms and data analysis will be crucial in identifying trade-offs and recommending a realistic operating point for the solution.
• Level up the team's AI/ML savviness as an AI knowledge catalyst.

You'll join a small, high-caliber team of ML specialists, large scale systems pros, NLP, Speech, and CV practitioners and researchers, product gurus, customer artiste, and world-class designers who are all low ego and humble, and passionate about the future brought by AI. We adapt quickly, continuously improve, and deliver high-impact results. We're not only aiming to build AI applications; we strive to build the best applications of AI the world has ever seen.

Many of our engineers have founded their own startups prior to forming Collaboration AI, and they bring a wide and diverse set of industry experience and expertise with them. We draw on this well of experiences every day as we collaborate on our own product, tech stack, and go to market strategy. We're highly collaborative, committed to building great things, and consider it a privilege to learn from each other every day.

• M.S. or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Mathematics, or a related field.
• 7+ years of experience in Natural Language Processing
• 2+ years of experience in leading a project as a tech lead
• Experience with common deep learning libraries, such as PyTorch, JAX, Keras, TensorFlow, etc., and familiar with ML ecosystems, such as Hugging Face

• Consistent track record of designing and shipping NLP/LLM applications in real world
• Strong collaboration and communication skills
• Experience building production AI applications
• Up-to-date knowledge in LLM, LLM systems, and LLM applications production systems.
• Excellent communication skills and ability to work effectively in a team environment.
• Experience with cloud computing platforms such as GCP or AWS is a plus.
• Evidence of research capacity in NLP (publications, patents, talks, etc.) is a plus.

#WeAreCisco where every individual brings their unique skills and perspectives together to pursue our purpose of powering an inclusive future for all.

Our passion is connection-we celebrate our employees' diverse set of backgrounds and focus on unlocking potential. Cisconians often experience one company, many careers where learning and development are encouraged and supported at every stage. Our technology, tools, and culture pioneered hybrid work trends, allowing all to not only give their best, but be their best.