Executive Director, AI-Driven Customer Engineering

Cisco Systems, Inc.; Milpitas (CA); On-site; USD 294,000 - 468,000; Full time

Job summary

Cisco is seeking a senior leader to build and scale Customer Engineering for enterprise AI platforms. You will define the operating model, own high-stakes escalations, and drive AI-native diagnostic automation across global teams.

The role interfaces with engineering, product management, CX, and sales to resolve complex incidents and improve platform resilience. Ideal candidates bring 15+ years in software/cloud/security engineering with proven people leadership and executive-facing

Qualifications

• 15+ years of software, cloud, or security engineering experience with customer-facing roles.
• People management experience, building and scaling engineering teams.
• Experience partnering with enterprise leadership during critical incidents.
• Experience designing triage models, severity frameworks, and on-call rotations.
• Bachelor's degree in CS, CE, or equivalent experience.

Responsibilities

• Establish the CE function from scratch with triage tiers and SLAs.
• Lead high-stakes escalations and present RCAs to executives.
• Architect AI-native diagnostic tooling and automations to reduce MTTR.
• Bridge CE with Core Engineering and enforce joint SLAs.
• Design and lead a rotation program embedding engineers into CE.

Skills

Customer-facing engineering

SRE/incident response

People management

Executive communication

Triaging models

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering

Tools

AI agents

LLM tooling

Job description

Cisco is seeking a senior leader to build and scale Customer Engineering for enterprise AI platforms. You will define the operating model, own high-stakes escalations, and drive AI-native diagnostic automation across global teams.

The role interfaces with engineering, product management, CX, and sales to resolve complex incidents and improve platform resilience. Ideal candidates bring 15+ years in software/cloud/security engineering with proven people leadership and executive-facing