Senior Director, Engineering (Customer Engineering - AI Team)

Cisco•Milpitas, MI

About The Position

Cisco’s AI Software & Platform Group builds enterprise AI platforms and developer tooling, integrating our networking, security, and observability portfolio with modern AI to power autonomous systems. We improve reinforcement learning, simulation, and predictive analytics to make enterprise AI accurate, grounded, and trustworthy. Within this group, we are building Customer Engineering (CE) as a strategic, AI-native engineering organization designed to revolutionize how we diagnose, resolve, and prevent complex technical escalations for our most demanding global enterprise customers. Sitting at the direct intersection of Engineering, Product Management, Customer Experience (CX/TAC), and Sales, this founding leadership role will define, scale, and lead the global operating model from the ground up. In this role, you will be the senior engineering voice when top-tier customers need answers during high-stakes production events, while pioneering AI-driven diagnostic automation and developer tooling that allows our engineering organization to scale non-linearly.

Requirements

15+ years of software, cloud, or security engineering experience, with significant hands-on depth in customer-facing engineering, escalation engineering, or SRE/incident response roles.
People management experience, including proven success building, structuring, and scaling engineering teams that debugs and triage complex distributed, multi-tenant cloud systems across the full stack.
Proven track record partnering directly with enterprise technical leadership and C-level executives during critical production incidents.
Experience designing triage models, severity frameworks, SLA definitions, and on-call runbook rotations.
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent industry experience.

Nice To Haves

Experience building or deploying AI agents, LLM-backed diagnostic tools, or intelligent workflow automation within engineering or support environments.
Proven experience founding or standing up a Customer Engineering, Tier-3 Escalation, or Production Operations organization from ground zero in a fast-scaling cloud or SaaS business.
Track record of managing people managers and scaling distributed, multi-region engineering teams.
Deep domain expertise in Cloud Security, SaaS architectures, Microservices, and Distributed systems.
Experience designing and executing engineering rotation programs that bridge product R&D with field support.
Strong executive gravitas with the ability to act as the decisive tiebreaker between rapid hotfix deployment and long-term architectural platform health.

Responsibilities

Establish the end-to-end CE function from scratch, defining triage tiers, response/resolution SLAs, and a "treat and discharge" motion that empowers engineers to write, test, and ship hotfixes/patches directly under rigorous safety guardrails.
Serve as the senior engineering authority for strategic enterprise accounts, leading the resolution of complex multi-tenant production issues and presenting Root Cause Analyses (RCAs) directly to customer C-suite and technical executives.
Architect and deploy AI agents, intelligent diagnostic tooling, and automated workflows that dramatically reduce Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) and eliminate repetitive triage without linear headcount growth.
Establish a high-integrity escalation interface where handoffs to core R&D arrive fully pre-triaged (reproduced, scoped, and root-caused); negotiate and enforce bidirectional SLAs between CE and core engineering teams.
Design and lead a continuous rotation program embedding core R&D engineers into CE for live customer troubleshooting, facilitating two-way knowledge transfer and real-world system resilience insights.
Partner with Product Management and R&D to translate recurring field telemetry, incident post-mortems, and customer pain points into platform-level roadmap enhancements that permanently eliminate repeat escalations.
Hire, mentor, and lead a high-caliber team of customer-facing engineers and frontline managers, establishing on-call protocols, runbooks, and clear technical career pathways.
Own and report on key operational health indicators including time-to-triage, time-to-resolution, % resolved at CE vs. escalated, repeat-issue rates, escalation SLA adherence, and customer CSAT/NPS.

Benefits

medical, dental and vision insurance
a 401(k) plan with a Cisco matching contribution
paid parental leave
short and long-term disability coverage
basic life insurance
grants of Cisco restricted stock units
10 paid holidays per full calendar year, plus 1 floating holiday for non-exempt employees
1 paid day off for employee’s birthday
paid year-end holiday shutdown
4 paid days off for personal wellness determined by Cisco
16 days of paid vacation time per full calendar year, accrued at rate of 4.92 hours per pay period for full-time employees (non-exempt employees)
flexible vacation time off program (exempt employees)
80 hours of sick time off provided on hire date and each January 1st thereafter
up to 80 hours of unused sick time carried forward from one calendar year to the next
Additional paid time away may be requested to deal with critical or emergency issues for family members
Optional 10 paid days per full calendar year to volunteer
annual bonuses
performance-based incentive pay