Principal AI Infrastructure Abstraction Engineer

Cisco

USA-PORTLAND, United States of America; Remote; Remote (United States of America) Posted today

$242,100 - $306,500/year

Role Details

The application window is expected to close on: 04/15/2026

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

Meet the Team

We are an innovation team on a mission to transform how enterprises harness AI. Operating with the agility of a startup and the focus of an incubator, we’re building a tight-knit group of AI and infrastructure experts driven by bold ideas and a shared goal: to rethink systems from the ground up and deliver breakthrough solutions that redefine what's possible — faster, leaner, and smarter.
We thrive in a fast-paced, experimentation-rich environment where new technologies aren’t just welcome — they’re expected. Here, you'll work side-by-side with seasoned engineers, architects, and thinkers to craft the kind of iconic products that can reshape industries and unlock entirely new models of operation for the enterprise.
If you're energized by the challenge of solving hard problems, love working at the edge of what's possible, and want to help shape the future of AI infrastructure — we'd love to meet you.

Your Impact

As an AI Infrastructure Abstraction Engineer, you will help shape the next generation of AI compute platforms by designing systems that abstract away hardware complexity and expose logical, scalable, and secure interfaces for AI workloads. Your work will enable multi-tenancy, resource isolation, and dynamic scheduling of GPUs and accelerators at scale — making infrastructure programmable, elastic, and developer-friendly.

You will bridge the gap between raw compute resources and AI/ML frameworks, allowing infrastructure teams and model developers to consume shared GPU resources with the performance and reliability of bare metal, but with the flexibility of cloud-native systems. Your contributions will empower internal and external users to run AI workloads securely, efficiently, and predictably — regardless of the underlying hardware topology.

This role is critical to enabling AI infrastructure that is multi-tenant by design, scalable in practice, and abstracted for portability across diverse platforms.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
* Design and implement infrastructure abstractions that cleanly separate logical compute units (vGPUs, GPU pods, AI queues) from physical hardware (nodes, devices, interconnects).
* Develop runtime services, APIs, and control planes to expose GPU and accelerator resources to users and frameworks with multi-tenant isolation and QoS guarantees.
* Architect systems for secure GPU sharing, including time-slicing, memory partitioning, and namespace isolation across tenants or jobs.
* Collaborate with platform, orchestration, and scheduling teams to map logical resources to physical devices based on utilization, priority, and topology.
* Define and enforce resource usage policies, including fair sharing, quota management, and oversubscription strategies.
* Integrate with model training and serving frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow, Triton) to ensure smooth and predictable resource consumption.
* Build observability and telemetry pipelines to trace logical-to-physical mappings, usage patterns, and performance anomalies.
* Partner with infrastructure security teams to ensure secure onboarding, access control, and workload isolation in shared environments.
* Support internal developers in adopting abstraction APIs, ensuring high performance while abstracting away low-level details.
* Contribute to the evolution of internal compute platform architecture, with a focus on abstraction, modularity, and scalability.

Minimum Qualifications:
* Bachelors + 15 years of related experience, or Masters + 12 years of related experience, or PhD + 8 years of related experience
* Experience building scalable, production-grade infrastructure components or control planes using Go, Python, and C++,
* Experience with Kubernetes, Docker or Kubevirt for virtualization, containerization, and orchestration frameworks
* Experience designing or implementing logical resource abstractions for compute, storage, or networking with a focus in multi-tenant environments.
* Experience integrating with AI/ML platforms or pipelines (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow, Triton Inference Server, MLFlow).

Preferred Qualifications:
* Experience with GPU sharing, scheduling, or isolation techniques (e.g., MPS, MIG, time-slicing, device plugin frameworks, or vGPU technologies).
* Solid grasp of resource management concepts including quotas, fairness, prioritization, and elasticity.

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:

The starting salary range posted for this position is $242,100.00 to $306,500.00 and reflects the projected salary range for new hires in this position in U.S. and/or Canada locations, not including incentive compensation*, equity, or benefits.

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:

$291,500.00 - $424,400.00

Non-Metro New York state & Washington state:

$259,400.00 - $377,600.00

* 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.

For more details click Job Post.

About Cisco

Cisco Systems is the world''s leading networking technology company, designing and manufacturing networking hardware, telecommunications equipment, and cybersecurity solutions for businesses and governments. Industry: Networking Technology & Cybersecurity