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We are seeking a Director, Forward Deployed Engineers to build and lead a distributed team of Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs). This team serves as the technical face of engineering for our largest and most strategic Security Service Edge (SSE) customers. We are looking for a seasoned leader who has "done the work"-someone who has personally navigated complex critical issues, understands the technical intricacies of our solutions, and possesses the vision to scale these capabilities across global regions. Your Impact In this US-based, global leadership role, you will define the operating model for our FDE function, ensuring technical excellence for our most critical accounts. You will act as the primary engineering partner to Sales, CX, Product, and regional leadership. - Team Leadership: Hire, develop, and retain senior technical talent while defining career paths and job architecture.
- Strategic Escalation Management: Own the SSE escalation function for key accounts, including intake, severity calibration, and executive-level communication. You will personally intervene in critical escalations to manage expectations and ensure timely resolution.
- Operational Excellence: Establish rigorous standards for account health, including deployment readiness, configuration stability, and proactive incident mitigation.
- Product Influence: Translate field-level insights and recurring escalation patterns into actionable, prioritized requirements for our Product and Engineering roadmaps.
- Performance Metrics: Define and report on key KPIs-such as time-to-mitigation and customer technical satisfaction-to drive data-backed engineering investments.
- Innovation & Enablement: Lead the automation roadmap (including AI-assisted analysis) and develop the knowledge base and runbooks necessary to scale the team effectively.
- Collaboration: Define and lead the operating model of the FDE team in collaboration with Customer Success, Engineering, Product Management, Professional Services, Account Teams, and Partners.
Minimum qualifications - Bachelor's Degree plus 14+ years of experience with a recent focus on cloud security products, with significant hands-on technical ownership of production customer environments.
- Proven experience leading technical teams, with a proven track record of hiring and mentoring senior individual contributors.
- Demonstrated expertise in managing high-severity customer critical issues at the executive level, including navigating complicated customer conversations.
- Proven proficiency across SSE domains: Zero Trust access, cloud web inspection, CASB, DLP, VPN, firewall policy or similar technologies.
- Experience influencing product and engineering roadmaps using evidence-based field data (preferably for Service Providers and/or Telcos)
Preferred qualifications - Experience building or meaningfully scaling a customer-facing engineering, forward-deployed, or escalation function from an early stage.
- Direct experience with large-scale multinational enterprise SSE or SASE rollouts.
- Extensive experience leading distributed teams across various time zones and cultures and ability to travel to customer sites, regional offices, partner locations as required.
- Familiarity with Cisco's security and networking products.
- Proven experience with SWG, VPN, FWaaS, DLP, CASB, and Identity/SSO integration in enterprise-grade deployments.
Message to applicants applying to work in the U.S. and/or Canada:The starting salary range posted for this position is $219,900.00 to $278,800.00 and reflects the projected salary range for new hires in this position in U.S. and/or Canada locations, not including incentive compensation*, equity, or benefits.
Individual pay is determined by the candidate's hiring location, market conditions, job-related skillset, experience, qualifications, education, certifications, and/or training. The full salary range for certain locations is listed below. For locations not listed below, the recruiter can share more details about compensation for the role in your location during the hiring process.
U.S. employees are offered benefits, subject to Cisco's plan eligibility rules, which include medical, dental and vision insurance, a 401(k) plan with a Cisco matching contribution, paid parental leave, short and long-term disability coverage, and basic life insurance. Please see the Cisco careers site to discover more benefits and perks. Employees may be eligible to receive grants of Cisco restricted stock units, which vest following continued employment with Cisco for defined periods of time.
U.S. employees are eligible for paid time away as described below, subject to Cisco's policies:
- 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, and 4 paid days off for personal wellness determined by Cisco
- Non-exempt employees** receive 16 days of paid vacation time per full calendar year, accrued at rate of 4.92 hours per pay period for full-time employees
- Exempt employees participate in Cisco's flexible vacation time off program, which has no defined limit on how much vacation time eligible employees may use (subject to availability and some business limitations)
- 80 hours of sick time off provided on hire date and each January 1st thereafter, and 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
For non-sales roles, employees are also eligible to earn annual bonuses subject to Cisco's policies.
Employees on sales plans earn performance-based incentive pay on top of their base salary, which is split between quota and non-quota components, subject to the applicable Cisco plan. For quota-based incentive pay, Cisco typically pays as follows:
- .75% of incentive target for each 1% of revenue attainment up to 50% of quota;
- 1.5% of incentive target for each 1% of attainment between 50% and 75%;
- 1% of incentive target for each 1% of attainment between 75% and 100%; and
- Once performance exceeds 100% attainment, incentive rates are at or above 1% for each 1% of attainment with no cap on incentive compensation.
For non-quota-based sales performance elements such as strategic sales objectives, Cisco may pay 0% up to 125% of target. Cisco sales plans do not have a minimum threshold of performance for sales incentive compensation to be paid.
The applicable full salary ranges for this position, by specific state, are listed below:
New York City Metro Area:
$219,900.00 - $325,100.00
Non-Metro New York state & Washington state:
$197,800.00 - $311,400.00
* For quota-based sales roles on Cisco's sales plan, the ranges provided in this posting include base pay and sales target incentive compensation combined.
** Employees in Illinois, whether exempt or non-exempt, will participate in a unique time off program to meet local requirements.
