Engineering Program Manager
About The Position
Cisco is building AI Canvas, a generative, collaborative workspace within its unified AI-native management platform spanning Networking, Security, Observability, and Collaboration. AI Canvas combines AI agents, real-time telemetry, and dynamic interfaces to help teams troubleshoot, decide, and act together. The role is part of a platform team delivering enterprise-grade AI capabilities in partnership with teams across Cisco, including Engineering, Design, Data/AI, Security, and Go-to-Market. As a Technical Program Manager, this position owns end-to-end execution of AI Canvas programs across multiple engineering teams and areas, including platform architecture, agent frameworks, user experience, data systems, security, and portfolio integrations. The role partners with senior engineering and product leaders to shape program execution, deliver releases from roadmap through general availability and post-launch stabilization, and lead AI programs from use-case definition through production and iteration. It also establishes evaluation-driven practices to measure AI quality, safety, latency, cost, and reliability before launch and in production, while bringing structure to ambiguous initiatives and communicating status, trade-offs, dependencies, and risks to executive leadership.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree with 12 or more years of related experience, a master’s degree with 8 or more years of related experience, a PhD with 5 or more years of related experience, or equivalent related work experience.
- Experience leading complex technical programs for enterprise SaaS products through production launch and ongoing operation.
- Experience directly leading at least one generative AI, LLM-based, or agentic capability through development, production launch, and post-launch iteration.
- Previous experience leading cross-functional technical programs across a highly matrixed engineering organization.
- Technical fluency in cloud platforms, APIs, distributed systems, data systems, and modern AI development and deployment practices.
Nice To Haves
- Experience leading multi-team SaaS or AI programs involving cloud-native architecture, API integrations, data platforms, AI evaluations, security, reliability, and customer-facing production launches.
- Experience with generative AI and agentic systems, including agent orchestration, tool use, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), evaluation frameworks, guardrails, observability, and human-in-the-loop workflows.
- Ability to understand system architecture, identify cross-platform dependencies, facilitate engineering trade-offs, and translate complex technical risks and decisions for executive audiences.
- Experience applying fit-for-purpose development and execution practices, including Agile methodologies, to improve planning, decision-making, delivery, and team learning.
- Strong ability to bring structure to ambiguous initiatives, drive timely decisions, and create accountability across product, engineering, security, compliance, customer experience, and go-to-market stakeholders.
Responsibilities
- Drive delivery of large, cross-functional AI Canvas releases from roadmap through general availability and post-launch stabilization.
- Translate product and technical strategy into execution plans, milestones, interdependency tracking, success metrics, and team ownership.
- Lead agentic AI programs from use-case definition through production and iteration, coordinating agent workflows, model and tool integration, grounding, evaluations, guardrails, and human oversight.
- Establish evaluation-driven delivery practices to measure AI quality, safety, latency, cost, and reliability before launch and monitor them in production.
- Manage large, moderate-to-high-risk programs with multiple interdependencies, structuring ambiguous initiatives and enabling timely decisions.
- Communicate program status, technical trade-offs, architecture dependencies, and critical-path risks to executive leadership, with clear recommendations.
- Partner with engineering, quality, and security teams to define validation, release, observability, and operational-readiness requirements.
Benefits
- Medical insurance
- Dental insurance
- Vision insurance
- 401(k) plan with Cisco matching contribution
- Paid parental leave
- Short- and long-term disability coverage
- Basic life insurance
- Restricted stock unit grants may be available, subject to eligibility and continued employment
- Paid holidays
- Floating holiday for non-exempt employees
- Paid birthday day off
- Paid year-end holiday shutdown
- Paid personal wellness days
- Paid vacation or flexible vacation time off, depending on employee classification
- Paid sick time
- Additional paid time away may be requested for critical or emergency family issues
- Optional paid volunteer days
- Annual bonuses for eligible non-sales roles
- Performance-based incentive pay for employees on sales plans
Stand Out From the Crowd
Upload your resume and get instant feedback on how well it matches this job.
What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
