Director, Forward Deployed Engineers - Secure Services Edge

Cisco is a technology company providing an end-to-end security portfolio, including VPN, Zero Trust access, cloud-based web inspection, firewall, CASB, and DLP. The Director, Forward Deployed Engineers will build and lead a distributed engineering team serving strategic Security Service Edge customers, managing escalations, operational standards, product feedback, performance metrics, automation, and cross-functional collaboration.

Responsibilities:

• 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

Requirements:

• 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)
• 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