Senior Director, Engineering (Customer Engineering - AI Team)

Job description

The application window is expected to close on: 09/10/2026 Meet the Team Cisco’s AI Software & Platform Group builds enterprise AI platforms and developer tooling, integrating our networking, security, and observability portfolio with modern AI to power autonomous systems. We improve reinforcement learning, simulation, and predictive analytics to make enterprise AI accurate, grounded, and trustworthy. Within this group, we are building Customer Engineering (CE) as a strategic, AI-native engineering organization designed to revolutionize how we diagnose, resolve, and prevent complex technical escalations for our most demanding global enterprise customers. Sitting at the direct intersection of Engineering, Product Management, Customer Experience (CX/TAC), and Sales, this founding leadership role will define, scale, and lead the global operating model from the ground up. In this role, you will be the senior engineering voice when top-tier customers need answers during high-stakes production events, while pioneering AI-driven diagnostic automation and developer tooling that allows our engineering organization to scale non-linearly. Your Impact As the Head of Customer Engineering, you will: Build & Scale the Operating Model: Establish the end-to-end CE function from scratch, defining triage tiers, response/resolution SLAs, and a "treat and discharge" motion that empowers engineers to write, test, and ship hotfixes/patches directly under rigorous safety guardrails. Lead High-Stakes Escalations & RCAs: Serve as the senior engineering authority for strategic enterprise accounts, leading the resolution of complex multi-tenant production issues and presenting Root Cause Analyses (RCAs) directly to customer C-suite and technical executives. Drive AI-Native Automation: Architect and deploy AI agents, intelligent diagnostic tooling, and automated workflows that dramatically reduce Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) and eliminate repetitive triage without linear headcount growth. Bridge CE and Core Engineering: Establish a high-integrity escalation interface where handoffs to core R&D arrive fully pre-triaged (reproduced, scoped, and root-caused); negotiate and enforce bidirectional SLAs between CE and core engineering teams. Pioneer the Core Engineering Rotation Program: Design and lead a continuous rotation program embedding core R&D engineers into CE for live customer troubleshooting, facilitating two-way knowledge transfer and real-world system resilience insights. Close the Product Feedback Loop: Partner with Product Management and R&D to translate recurring field telemetry, incident post-mortems, and customer pain points into platform-level roadmap enhancements that permanently eliminate repeat escalations. Recruit & Develop Top Talent: Hire, mentor, and lead a high-caliber team of customer-facing engineers and frontline managers, establishing on-call protocols, runbooks, and clear technical career pathways. Drive Operational Metrics: Own and report on key operational health indicators including time-to-triage, time-to-resolution, % resolved at CE vs. escalated, repeat-issue rates, escalation SLA adherence, and customer CSAT/NPS. Minimum Qualifications 15+ years of software, cloud, or security engineering experience, with significant hands-on depth in customer-facing engineering, escalation engineering, or SRE/incident response roles. People management experience, including proven success building, structuring, and scaling engineering teams that debugs and triage complex distributed, multi-tenant cloud systems across the full stack. Proven track record partnering directly with enterprise technical leadership and C-level executives during critical production incidents. Experience designing triage models, severity frameworks, SLA definitions, and on-call runbook rotations. Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent industry experience. Preferred Qualifications Experience building or deploying AI agents, LLM-backed diagnostic tools, or intelligent workflow automation within engineering or support environments. Proven experience founding or standing up a Customer Engineering, Tier-3 Escalation, or Production Operations organization from ground zero in a fast-scaling cloud or SaaS business. Track record of managing people managers and scaling distributed, multi-region engineering teams. Deep domain expertise in Cloud Security, SaaS architectures, Microservices, and Distributed systems. Experience designing and executing engineering rotation programs that bridge product R&D with field support. Strong executive gravitas with the ability to act as the decisive tiebreaker between rapid hotfix deployment and long-term architectural platform health. 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 $293,900.00 to $406,800.00 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: $293,900.00 - $467,900.00 Non-Metro New York state & Washington state: $285,600.00 - $432,300.00 * 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.