Software Engineering Technical Leader

Job description

Develops software consistent with Cisco "Design Thinking Principles" with a focus on simplification and UX (User Experience) at its core, using secure coding practices, ensuring user privacy, and following software development best practices. Partners with other teams including design and product management to create the right solution for the customers. Creates technical design documentation to be used by the team as well as contributing to user documentation to be used by end users. Brings new ideas for product innovation and helps improve software development processes. What You'll Do: Recognized as an expert within Cisco. Proactively identifies and participates in the resolution of complex problems that impact the direction of the business. Develops and delivers innovative strategies that benefit customers and/or clients. Leads major business projects which impact a region or entire function — proving the model on Isovalent first before extending it across broader SBG engineering. Contributes to the development of annual organizational objectives/priorities. Builds and maintains long-term relationships with key stakeholders to ensure products and services reflect the needs and direction of the business — including the central program management org, which keeps cross-Cisco alignment, and product management, both of whom get a concrete, shared view and control across engineering tooling. Translates and influences the regional or functional strategic vision into a technical vision with clear engineering priorities, ensuring understanding and alignment across teams. May lead projects that span the business segment, function or region. May drive large features from technical design through completion. Leads the development and implementation of software development lifecycle and agile engineering strategies across applicable teams, including the tooling and integrations that connect ticketing systems, meeting recordings and transcripts, and milestone data into a shared source of truth for engineering and product management. Influences technical direction and deliverables across the function. Recognizes and makes trade-offs with respect to the whole system and defines new product categories — including treating the internal status/reporting system itself as a product with real users (engineers, program managerss, leadership). Leads design choices within the context of all Cisco offerings. Drives product success through creating metrics and influencing product adoption and direction — including cutting the time engineering and product management spend aligning ahead of a cross-team engineering or business commit. Writes and sets the standard for functional clean code. Develops and drives utilization and support for processes for issue identification and sustainable response, proactive tooling, and continuous improvement for production systems. Industry or thought leader on scale, performance, or design patterns. May represent or present team outputs at external events. Communicates product or program priorities, deadlines, and shifts in requirements in the context of engineering priorities and user needs. Negotiates and drives trade-offs in timing, design, and specifications to meet the needs of users and cross-functional partners. Leads, mentors, and influences senior engineers. Improves knowledge-sharing processes by building systems that make information from meeting recordings, transcripts, and status materials searchable, connected, and useful to engineering and product teams. Minimum Qualifications: Bachelors + 12 years of related experience, or Masters + 8 years of related experience, or PhD + 5 years of related experience. Requires specialized depth and/or breadth of expertise in primary job family or field of specialization; has a wide-range of experiences and advanced technical acumen serving as an advisor to management. Preferred Qualifications: Experience designing and building internal engineering tools, integrations, APIs, or data pipelines across systems such as Jira, GitHub, CDET, collaboration platforms, and meeting recording or transcription services. Experience turning fragmented operational data into reliable, searchable, and actionable views of milestones, dependencies, and delivery status. A track record of treating internal developer or process tooling as a product, with defined users, a clear UX standard, and measures of adoption or impact. Comfort serving as the technical owner of a cross-functional initiative, working directly with engineering, product management, and central PM teams. Experience identifying and connecting to existing enterprise processes and systems rather than creating parallel sources of information. Experience proving an approach with one team, measuring its impact, and scaling it across a broader organization. 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.