Lab Operations Manager

Job description

Meet the Team Join the Cisco Silicon One team in accelerating the delivery of next-generation networking products through robust, scalable, and high-performance development infrastructure. Our organization serves as the backbone for silicon development, validation, and product execution, providing the essential compute, hardware, and lab ecosystems required for industry-leading innovation. The Role We are seeking a high-driven, results-oriented multidisciplinary orchestrator to act as the primary catalyst for our development infrastructure. In this role, you will operate at the critical intersection of product strategy, hardware engineering, and lab operations, serving as the connective tissue that aligns disparate teams under a unified goal. You will be responsible for driving cross-functional alignment across the organization, effectively managing stakeholders with differing ownership to ensure infrastructure roadmaps scale alongside product milestones. This position requires a self-starter comfortable pushing for success in ambiguous environments, where you will translate high-level strategy into the tactical execution of the physical and virtual ecosystems that power our development lifecycle. Your Impact You will own the end-to-end lifecycle of infrastructure projects, ensuring that our Sanity Test Beds and development environments are optimized to meet aggressive product launch timelines. By bridging the gap between engineering roadmaps and infrastructure requirements, you will serve as the engine that ensures our teams have the right resources at the right time, regardless of technical or organizational complexity. Key Responsibilities Strategic Orchestration & Alignment Unified Roadmap Integration: Translate complex product development roadmaps into long-term infrastructure requirements, driving cross-functional alignment between silicon milestones and lab availability. Stakeholder Management: Act as the primary liaison between hardware engineering, software development, procurement, and lab operations; navigate competing priorities among stakeholders with differing ownership to keep teams synchronized. Ambiguity Management: Proactively identify project roadblocks and navigate ambiguous environments to push critical-path dependencies to resolution. Operational Velocity: Drive continuous improvement in infrastructure processes, identifying and removing friction to increase overall engineering velocity. Operational Oversight & Execution Strategic Capacity Planning: Lead high-stakes capacity management efforts, forecasting needs for power, rack space, and compute resources to proactively eliminate infrastructure bottlenecks. Lifecycle Ownership: Oversee the full lifecycle of infrastructure projects—from initial procurement and technical specification through deployment, validation, and transition to operational readiness. Visibility & Reporting: Drive the development of dashboards and reporting mechanisms to provide real-time visibility into infrastructure health, ensuring data-driven decision-making across the organization. Vendor & Asset Optimization: Partner with cross-functional leadership to manage technical specifications, equipment lead times, and hardware lifecycles, ensuring a high-performance, cost-effective infrastructure footprint. Minimum Qualifications Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience. 7+ years of experience in Technical Program Management within hardware development, semiconductor, or complex infrastructure environments. Deep understanding of Software/Hardware Development Lifecycles (SDLC/HDLC), including ASIC development and silicon validation. Core Competency: Influencing without authority, with a proven ability to align diverse technical teams toward a singular objective. Core Competency: High-drive/Self-starter attitude, with a relentless focus on delivering results in fast-paced, high-stakes environments. Proven ability to manage complex, cross-functional projects with multiple high-stakes dependencies. Exceptional communication skills, with the ability to translate technical infrastructure needs for varied stakeholders. Proficiency in standard project management methodologies (Agile/Waterfall) and tools (Jira, Confluence). Preferred Qualifications Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field. Direct experience managing development labs, hardware validation environments, or large-scale test infrastructure. Familiarity with compute infrastructure, high-speed networking, traffic generation systems, and hardware test automation/CI/CD pipelines. Experience with technical equipment procurement, vendor management, and budget planning. Strong track record of developing infrastructure observability tools and driving operational excellence across large engineering organizations. 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.