Performance Engineer, AI

The application window is expected to close on: September 26, 2025

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

This role requires working onsite 3 days a week in our lab located in San Jose, CA.

Meet the Team

The Cisco UCS Performance team optimizes and benchmarks the performance of UCS products including AI servers and X-series & C-series servers. Join us as a highly motivated and driven Technical Marketing Engineer to define, validate, and drive compute & AI performance on UCS.

Your Impact

The Cisco UCS Compute BU is looking for a Performance Engineer, Technical Marketing that will have a focus on our Compute platform performance with specific expertise in AI server performance, liquid cooling platform testing and industry standard AI benchmarking like MLPerf Inferencing & Training. The right candidate will have extensive hands-on experience in performance testing with these platforms (NVIDIA DGX/HGX platforms) with specific knowledge of liquid cooling technology. This is an onsite role at San Jose.

Role also includes the following:

• Conduct performance tests on UCS AI platforms.
• Use industry-standard benchmarking tools (e.g., MLPerf, GenAI perf) to evaluate system performance.
• In-depth analysis and evaluation of AI Servers with Liquid cooling technologies.
• Provide technical guidance to improve UCS performance specific to liquid cooling environments.
• Build performance benchmarks, analyze results, and develop technical marketing materials (white papers, standard process guides, presentations).
• Solve Cisco UCS AI server related performance issues.
• Collaborate with engineering, product management, and sales teams to ensure industry-leading UCS performance on AI servers.
• Support Cisco Technical support for performance debugging and optimizations.
• Must be a self-starter and a teammate.
• Ability to set and meet timelines.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's or master's degree with 7+ years' experience in Hardware Engineering, Performance Engineering or similar engineering roles.
• Experience with performance testing or performance evaluations related to hardware and networking products such as servers, operating systems, AI platforms, etc. while using various profiling and benchmarking tools, including but not limited to analyzing computational efficiency, latency, throughput, and resource utilization.
• 2+ years of experience working with server hardware, including server bring-ups, OS installations, GPUs, AI Server technologies or other data center networking technologies.
• Minimum 1 year experience working with AI technologies, ideally some experience configuring and supporting AI servers or accelerators (GPUs, TPUs) in a networked hardware environment, or completion of at least one project involving AI workload deployment and integration.

Preferred Qualifications

• Strong communication skills, with the ability to convey technical information between customers and engineering teams.
• Understanding of Liquid cooling technologies such as Direct to chip, Immersion cooling or other cooling technologies.
• Understanding of high-performance computing AI workloads, and other AI infrastructure components.
• Collaborate with hardware and software teams to optimize system configurations for AI platform performance.
• Familiarity with deep learning frameworks (TensorFlow, PyTorch, etc.) and performance optimization.
• Machine Learning/AI Knowledge: Understanding of machine learning models, neural networks, and deep learning architectures.
• Identify performance bottlenecks and implement optimizations to improve training & inference models, reduce latency, and optimize resource usage.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with the ability to diagnose and address performance issues in complex systems

#Compute2025

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. Simply put - we power the future.

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.