Principal Architect - SASE - CX CTO

What You’ll Do Are you interested in building the future of Cisco’s customer experience? We are looking for a seasoned Principal Architect to join the Customer Experience Chief Technology Office (CX CTO) team, leading the CX innovation work, driving our technology delivery standards for excellence, and developing the career paths for current and future technical talent. As part of CX CTO team, you will be part of the group driving technology strategy for a multi- billion-dollar business. The CX Engineering and Product Incubation team is chartered with defining and building the Cisco CX Cloud Platform. This critical technology initiative takes our current successful portfolio to the next level, enabling deeper customer insights by infusing analytics, machine learning, high scale architecture and process automation into the very core of our offerings.
A CX Principal Architect navigates multi-domain architecture complexity and can articulate at a high-level the end-to-end intent-based networking / policy-driven approach for Cisco’s market-ready and existing solutions or in the context of a customer’s future state architecture.
As security shifts to the cloud, SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) offers an alternative to traditional data center -oriented security. In this role, you will be the CX Cloud SASE evangelist and thought leader. Chartered with translating customer requirements into solutions to business problem s , you will understand the overall security landscape and work to reduce complexity and improve speed and agility of the platform by unifying networking and security into a cloud-delivered service.
As an industry thought leader, you will represent CX in external and industry forums, and will generate creative and innovative solutions, working to further document and protect Cisco intellectual property. You will also develop technical collateral including technical case studies, best practices guides , whitepapers, and solution reference architecture documents to share knowledge and drive adoption.
Who You’ll Work With You will work with some of the best and brightest technology leaders in the industry. As part of the CX CTO team, you will be critical in transforming Cisco’s digital customer experience. You will work with principal engineers and architects, product management, executives, and other stakeholders to define the technical roadmap for the product in response to customer requirements and market forces and ultimately deliver enterprise-class solutions that enrich the customer experience. You will be an integral part of Cisco’s senior technical leadership community, recognized as a thought leader within Cisco and the broader industry.
Who You Are You are an inspiring innovator, mentor, and coach, conversant and passionate about emerging opportunities. You lead by example and demonstrate excellence in collaboration and communication, with a knack for creative problem solving and a proven track record for leading teams to deliver high quality outcomes. You are also an effective spokesperson and champion for the engineering teams, passionate about mentoring and developing engineers to build a strong bench. You are a thought leader and a rigorous thinker who is equally comfortable and capable interacting with technologists as with senior business executives with the ability to articulate the value of the proposed solution. You value simplicity at scale and are dedicated to maintaining a culture of quality, reliability, security, and disciplined execution.
You have a deep technical understanding of cybersecurity products, integrations, and critical cyber threats facing our customer’s environments and are a pioneer in enabling enterprises to scale with managed, cloud-native, secure connections and Secure SD-WAN/SASE solutions.
You have a BS Degree in Computer Science or Engineering plus 15+ years of related experience and are recognized as a strategic thinker in internal and external forums, with extensive technical, market and business expertise.
You Are Highly Capable Of
Applying advanced analytical thought and judgment to think beyond existing solutions
Working with stakeholders to set product vision, define, and deliver on technical roadmaps
Providing technical leadership for high-profile customer engagements
Articulating the architectural principles for SaaS-based capabilities
Leading strategy and development in distributed large-scale cloud-native technology stacks
Incubating, conceptualizing, planning, designing, and leading transformational projects
Working in distributed architectures and working with data structures and algorithms
Incorporating Security, Scalability, Availability, and SRE practices into solutions
Building and deploying mission-critical, 24x7 solutions in a SaaS environment
Micro Services API design and development aligned to the OpenAPI specification
Problem solving, debugging, and troubleshooting with advanced development skills
Architecting and validating solutions which address the identified security challenges
Providing thought-leadership in the constantly changing environment of SASE
You Are Also
Experienced with modern application development methodologies (CI/CD, Agile/DevOps)
Skilled in at least one programming language (C/C++, Java, JavaScript Python, Go)
Familiar with networking protocols and standard network architectures
Familiar with serverless technologies (AWS Lambda, Fargate , Stepfunctions )
Advanced public cloud knowledge (AWS, Azure, GCP - certification a plus)
Able to set up and manage continuous integration/delivery tools (Jenkins)
Linux Administrator, versatile in console commands, scripting, utilities (PERL, Python, BASH)
Knowledgeable about database systems, storage ( Cassandra, MongoDB)
Experienced in container and container orchestration technologies (Docker, Kubernetes)
Experience in using configuration management tools (Chef, Puppet, Ansible)
Capable of implementing monitoring tools (AWS CloudWatch, Datadog, Prometheus)
An expert in enterprise networking (WAN, SD-WAN, VPN, Routing )
Strong in IT Security (SIEM, SOAR, SOC, XDR)
Experience d in Network Security (NGFW, SWG, Firewall as a Service or Sandboxing )
Experienced in tunneling protocols (SSL/TLS, IPSec , GRE, DMVPN)
Experienced in authentication methodologies ( 2FA, RADIUS, LDAP, AD )
Able to build infrastructure as code (Terraform)

We Are Cisco
#WeAreCisco, where each person is unique, but we bring our talents to work as a team and make a difference. Here’s how we do it.
We embrace digital, and help our customers implement change in their digital businesses. Some may think we’re “old” (30 years strong!) and only about hardware, but we’re also a software company. And a security company. An AI/Machine Learning company. We even invented an intuitive network that adapts, predicts, learns, and protects. No other company can do what we do – you can’t put us in a box!
But “Digital Transformation” is an empty buzz phrase without a culture that allows for innovation, creativity, and yes, even failure (if you learn from it.)
Day to day, we focus on the give and take. We give our best, we give our egos a break and we give of ourselves (because giving back is built into our DNA.) We take accountability, we take bold steps, and we take difference to heart. Because without diversity of thought and a commitment to equality for all, there is no moving forward.
So, you have colorful hair? Don’t care. Tattoos? Show off your ink. Like polka dots? That’s cool.