Leader, Software Engineering

Enables the engineering team to improve and optimize the engineering processes and infrastructure to deliver a great experience to the engineering organization for building products. Directs the activities of a software systems development function, software applications development function, and a software quality assurance function for software enhancements and new products including cloud-based or internet-related tools.
Your Impact

• Leads engineering teams to design, build, and scale high-quality software products and foundational technologies. Drives improvements in engineering processes, infrastructure, and organizational effectiveness to enable secure, reliable, and efficient product development across the broader engineering organization.
• Lead and mentor a team of software engineers in the design, development, and delivery of products or core technologies
• Own execution of large, complex initiatives—from technical design through delivery
• Drive organizational-level engineering strategy, influencing multiple teams and aligning technical direction with business goals
• Develop and grow engineering leaders, including mentoring managers and senior engineers to scale team impact
• Collaborate cross-functionally to align on architecture, dependencies, and technical standards
• Define, implement, and continuously improve engineering processes (design reviews, security, testing, etc.)Establish and enforce engineering excellence frameworks (coding standards, system design principles, operational best practices)
• Drive best practices in system design, architecture, and secure development
• Make and guide critical tradeoff decisions to balance scalability, performance, cost, and quality
• Ensure high product quality within your area; identify and address systemic risks and improvement opportunities
• Own long-term technical vision and roadmap alignment across teams, ensuring scalability and sustainability of systems
• Contribute to product roadmap planning, including timelines, resource estimation, and execution strategy
• Influence cross-team prioritization and resource allocation to maximize organizational impact
• Partner with stakeholders, customers, and cross-functional teams to gather feedback and incorporate it into solutions
• Lead multi-disciplinary collaboration across Product, QA, Operations, and external vendors to deliver projects on time
• Drive operational excellence, including reliability, observability, incident management, and continuous improvement at scale

Minimum Qualification

• Bachelor’s degree + 15 years of relevant experience, OR
• Master’s degree + 12 years, OR
• PhD + 8 years
• 6+ years of people management experience

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.