Senior Director of Engineering

The Innovation team within Cisco's Infrastructure and Security Group incubates brand new technologies at the intersection of security, networking, silicon, and optics. Our mission: to enable the world to connect with confidence on any device, anywhere, anytime.

This team is responsible for delivering innovations such as the Cisco Smart Switch and is now focused on scaling Cisco Hypershield, a next-generation security platform designed with AI from the ground up. Hypershield protects applications, devices, and data across public and private data centers, clouds, and physical locations-anywhere our customers need security.

We are seeking a Senior Director of Engineering to own the architecture, long-range technical vision, and execution for Cisco Hypershield. This is a pivotal leadership role responsible for scaling the engineering organization from seed-stage velocity to $100M+ ARR, in close collaboration with executive leadership, product management, and strategic customers.

You are a leader with deep technical skills in distributed systems, cloud SaaS and high-speed networking, able to combine deep product architecture expertise with a proven track record of scaling an engineering organization for rapid growth. You are comfortable in design discussions with architects and engineers. You can review architecture designs and solutions, providing feedback that will help your team members gain alignment. You are not afraid to be constantly learning, leading a team that is using innovative programming languages, AI technologies, and modern tooling to deliver groundbreaking new features at rapid speed.

Reporting directly to the CTO of the Security and Infrastructure Group, you will lead the engineering charter for Cisco Hypershield and associated next-generation, AI-powered security products.

• Scale and lead a 40+ person globally distributed engineering team, instilling clear goals, a servant-leadership culture, and resilient DevOps practices
• Manage the strategy and day-to-day work of the Hypershield team
• Lead the integration of Hypershield into Cisco's Smart Hardware family (e.g., Smart Switch)
• Champion AI-powered security co-pilot initiatives combining real-time telemetry, RAG-based LLMs, and analytics at billions-of-events-per-day scale
• Identify and solve obstacles to product-market fit, growth, and operational scalability

• Demonstrable experience building production-grade software, including 10+ years scaling and leading engineering orgs across startup and Fortune-100 environments.
• Demonstrated ability to hire, mentor and retain top-tier engineering talent while driving a high-performance culture.
• Deep technical chops in network security, SD-WAN and carrier-grade routing/switching (e.g., Cisco ASR9K), plus cloud-native SaaS experience at global scale.
• AI/ML leader with a track record of shipping data-driven security or networking features powered by modern LLMs and large-scale analytics.
• Consistent record of shipping multi-billion-dollar hardware platforms (e.g., ASR9K) and taking green-field cloud services from zero to GA/production.

• Production experience in C, Go, P4, JavaScript/TypeScript, and modern DevOps/CI-CD pipelines.
• Practitioner of Agile, lean and GitOps methodologies; comfortable iterating at startup velocity.
• Experience with broader Cisco product portfolio, partner ecosystem and internal processes.
• BS/MS or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering or related field.
• 10+ issued patents in networking, cloud or security domains.

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