Meet the Team
QUAD is responsible for ensuring world-class quality and reliability across multiple hardware platforms at Cisco. Within QUAD, we investigates the complex customer-impacting issues across multiple product lines. Our mission is to rapidly identify true root causes, detect systemic trends early, and support engineering teams with actionable insights that drive product reliability and customer trust.
This role sits at the intersection of hardware engineering, quality team, Diag, supply chain team, and manufacturing. You will support investigations across all platforms, drawing from manufacturing data, FA cases, diagnostic logs, and field usage insights. You will operate with high autonomy, shaping standards, building new analytical capabilities, and creating automated systems that will scale across Cisco's hardware portfolio.
Your Impact:
As a Senior Data Scientist, you will drive FA insights, streamline workflows, and enable proactive reliability improvements. Your work will help FA and engineering teams make faster, data-driven decisions, reduce manual effort, and prevent customer-visible issues.
Field Failure Analytics & Investigations (Analysis) Analyze FA cases across platforms using QMS, Snowflake, SR reports, and service data to uncover failure patterns and emerging issues. Review each case in detail, considering prior failure history, potential links to other issues, and customer usage conditions. Build and maintain historical FA data to enable trend analysis, track recurring failures, and support more informed root-cause investigations.
Data Engineering & Automation (Summary) Aggregate, clean, and join data from MFG, Snowflake, QMS, service depots, CDETS, and diagnostic systems. Assess links to design problems, customer usage, diagnostics coverage gaps, and process variations, identifying key trends and areas requiring further investigation.
Build dashboards, metrics, and automated reports using Tableau, Power BI, or Grafana to summarize findings into actionable outputs that streamline FA workflows and support engineering decision-making.
Advanced Analytics & Modeling (Correlation) Leverage advanced analytics-including classification, clustering, anomaly detection, trend analysis, and predictive modeling-to identify recurring failure modes and emerging reliability risks. Correlate data across yields, suppliers, materials, environmental factors, factories, Diag and HW design to forecast potential issues and enable proactive reliability improvements.
Cross-Functional Collaboration (Echo Back) Partner with FA, Diagnostics, Hardware, and Manufacturing teams to understand debug workflows, coverage gaps, design sensitivities, and process parameters. Present insights clearly to leadership and stakeholders, enabling faster root-cause alignment and actionable cross-functional recommendations.
Minimum Qualifications:
Bachelors + 12 years of related experience, or Masters + 8 years of related experience, or PhD + 5 years of related experience.
5+ years' experience with SQL, data visualization tools (e.g. Tableau, Power BI or Grafana) version control (e.g Git,) and data pipeline tools(dbt).
5+ years' experience working with core statistical concepts (regression, clustering, classification, anomaly detection)
Demonstrated experience with Linux command and Git experience
Ability to communicate sophisticated concepts to a variety of audiences with different backgrounds.
Preferred Qualifications:
Experience in hardware failure analysis, reliability engineering, quality, or manufacturing analytics.
Familiarity with diagnostic logs, JSON logs, SR/FA workflows and process.
Knowledge of manufacturing test coverage, EDVT, environmental sensitivities, or FA methodologies.
Experience with advanced data engineering and big data platforms (Hadoop/Hive, Apache Spark / PySpark, Azure data bricks, Snowflake etc)
Experience with Machine Learning and Statistical Modeling Frameworks (Scikit-learn, TensorFlow, PyTorch, Deep Learning, NLP etc)
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 $226,300.00 to $293,300.00 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:
$226,300.00 - $337,300.00
Non-Metro New York state & Washington state:
$205,600.00 - $300,800.00
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.
Cisco is an Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity Employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, genetic information, age, disability, veteran status, or any other legally protected basis.
Cisco will consider for employment, on a case by case basis, qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
