Applied AI Scientist

Meet the Team

Splunk, a Cisco company, is building a safer, more resilient digital world with an end‑to‑end, full‑stack platform designed for hybrid, multi‑cloud environments. Join the Foundational Modeling team at Splunk, where we advance the state of AI for high‑volume, real‑time, multi‑modal machine‑generated data — including logs, time series, traces, and events. We combine deep AI research expertise with the scale and operational excellence of Splunk and Cisco’s global engineering capabilities. Our work spans networking, security, observability, and customer experience — designing and deploying foundation models that enhance reliability, strengthen security, prevent downtime, and deliver predictive insights across Splunk Observability, Security, and Platform at enterprise scale. You’ll be part of a culture that values technical excellence, impact‑driven innovation, and cross‑functional collaboration — all within a flexible, growth‑oriented environment.

Your Impact

• Own and develop specific components of foundation-model pipelines for machine-generated data—primarily logs, with supporting work across time series, traces, and events.
• Implement and optimize parts of distributed training and inference workflows, including profiling, scaling, and efficiency improvements.
• Collaborate with engineering, product, and data science teams to translate requirements into workable prototypes and support production integration.
• Participate in team knowledge-sharing, documentation, and internal technical discussions to help strengthen collective expertise.
• Stay current with emerging AI/ML advances and bring relevant ideas, papers, and techniques into ongoing research and development.
  
  

Minimum Qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science or related quantitative field, or Master plus 2+ years of industry research experience.
• Proven track record in at least one of the following areas: large language modeling for both structure and unstructured data, deep learning‑based time series modeling, advanced anomaly detection, and multi-modality modeling.
• Solid proficiency in Python and deep learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow)
• Experience translating research ideas into production systems.
  
  

Preferred Qualifications

• Deep NLP & Domain‑Adapted LLMs: Background in building and adapting large‑scale language models (e.g., T5, BERT, LLaMA) for specialized domains including structured/unstructured logs, text, and event sequences.
• Log Analytics Expertise – In‑depth knowledge of structured/unstructured system logs, event sequence analysis, anomaly detection, and root cause identification.
• Advanced Anomaly Detection – Experience creating robust, scalable approaches (statistical, deep learning, or hybrid) for high‑volume, real‑time logs data.
• Multi‑Modal AI Modeling – Strong track record fusing logs, time series, traces, tabular data, and graphs for foundation models tackling complex operational insights.
• Large‑Scale Training & Optimization – Experience optimizing model architectures, distributed training pipelines, and inference efficiency to minimize cost and latency while preserving accuracy.
• MLOps & Continuous Learning – Fluency in automated retraining, drift detection, incremental updates, and production monitoring of ML models.
• Strong Research Track Record – Publications in top AI/ML conferences or journals (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI, CVPR, ACL, KDD) demonstrating contributions to state‑of‑the‑art methods and real‑world applications.
  
  

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.