Meet the TeamT

The Cisco SD-WAN dataplane team is at the forefront of innovation, designing and implementing the high-performance, intelligent packet forwarding engine that powers Cisco's industry-leading SD-WAN solutions. We build the core intelligence that directs traffic across diverse networks, ensuring optimal application performance, security, and user experience. Our team thrives on tackling complex engineering challenges, pushing the boundaries of what's possible in network virtualization and software-defined networking. We are a collaborative group of passionate engineers dedicated to delivering robust, scalable, and cutting-edge solutions that shape the future of enterprise networking.

Your Impact: As a technical leader, you will lead the architectural strategy for our high-performance data plane, mentor engineers in advanced systems programming, and champion the adoption of modern AI-assisted development workflows to enhance team productivity and code reliability. You will leverage AI-assisted coding tools—such as GitHub Copilot, OpenAI Codex, and similar generative AI assistants—to accelerate development cycles, enhance code quality, and automate routine engineering tasks.

Your responsibilities will include -

Technical Leadership & Strategy: Define the architectural vision for the SD-WAN data plane. Make critical decisions regarding packet processing, tunneling technologies (IPsec, GRE), and routing protocols. Ensure all designs are scalable, high-performance, and aligned with Cisco's long-term networking strategy.
AI-Driven Engineering Excellence: Lead the team in adopting AI-assisted coding tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, OpenAI Codex). Define best practices for using these tools to accelerate development, automate unit testing, and perform intelligent refactoring while maintaining strict security and quality standards.
Team Mentorship & Development: Provide technical mentorship to engineers on C/C++ systems programming, kernel-level development, and DPDK/high-performance frameworks. Foster a culture of continuous learning, specifically regarding the intersection of networking and AI/ML.
Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with Product Management and other engineering leads to translate complex networking requirements into actionable development roadmaps.
Operational Excellence: Oversee the stability of the forwarding engine. Lead root cause analysis for complex system-level issues in high-throughput environments and implement preventative architectural improvements.

Minimum Qualifications

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
8+ years of professional software development experience, with minimum of 3+ years of technical leadership or senior engineering role with a strong focus on systems programming and networking protocols.
Proficiency in C/C++/Python and a strong understanding of data structures, algorithms, and object-oriented design.
Experience with network data plane development, including concepts like packet processing, QoS, routing protocols (e.g., BGP, OSPF), and tunneling technologies (e.g., IPsec, GRE).
Demonstrated ability to debug complex system-level issues and optimize performance in high-throughput environments.
Proven experience implementing and optimizing critical data plane security and resiliency features, including NAT/PAT, High Availability (HA) failover mechanisms, and stateful service processing.
Proficiency in using AI-assisted coding tools, such as GitHub Copilot, OpenAI Codex, or similar platforms, to improve developer productivity, streamline code reviews, and maintain high standards of code maintainability.
Exceptional communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence technical direction across geographically distributed teams.
Experience with SD-WAN technologies and architectures (e.g., Cisco SD-WAN/Viptela, overlay/underlay networking).
Experience with concurrent programming, multi-threading, and performance tuning in large-scale distributed systems.

Preferred Qualifications

Familiarity with Linux kernel development, DPDK, or other high-performance packet processing frameworks.
Experience with network function virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) principles.
Exposure to AI/ML concepts and their application in network optimization, anomaly detection, or predictive analytics.

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.

Technical Leader - Software

Software Engineering Technical Leader