Dataplane Software Engineering Technical Leader

The application window for this position is expected to close September 18, 2025; position may close sooner if a sufficient number of applications is received.

Who We Are

As part of Cisco's Security Business Group, the Security Innovation team incubates ideas for the leading provider of network security services, which enables the world to connect with confidence on any device, anywhere, anytime. Our product portfolio includes the cloud delivered firewall, Web proxy, Zero Trust Proxy, NaaS integrations, and inspection services as highly available distributed systems using cloud engineering practices. We are now engineering a highly available distributed security fabric that brings it all together, Cisco Hypershield. We are highly passionate about the interconnected SASE world, and this is part of our continued commitment to offer customer-focused security products at the edge of technology.

Cisco Hypershield protects applications, devices and data across public and private data centers, clouds and physical locations - anywhere customers need it. Designed and built with AI in mind from the start, Hypershield enables organizations to achieve security outcomes beyond what has been possible with humans alone.

Your Impact

You are a creative and skilled technical professional who excels at solving complex problems. As a passionate innovator and self-starter, you turn strategic visions into reality by being agile and adapting swiftly to evolving priorities. You thrive in fast-paced environments, efficiently developing high-quality code while seamlessly collaborating with diverse team members and stakeholders to achieve shared goals. Using your strong communication, empathy, and analytical abilities, you collaborate effectively by listening, finding common ground, and working as a team to find the best product solutions.

The Technical Leader role works alongside some of the brightest mind in the industry to deliver security network solutions on appliance-based platforms with data processing units (DPUs) and network processing units (NPUs). Typical responsibilities include:

• Development with third party SDKs, implementing build environment frameworks, designing test-harnesses for hardware bringup & debugging third party tools with external vendors
• Close interaction with customers to gather requirements, explain system design, share timelines, address difficulties, questions, issues, help in adoption.
• Owning the design and architecture of robust software systems, making design choices and dictating coding standards, tools, and platforms.
• Provide technical leadership by guiding and mentoring a team of Software Engineers, driving technical excellence in SDK development.

Minimum Qualifications for this Role:

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or related field
• 7+ years of experience with networking. e.g. processing packet streams, TCP reassembly, DPDK, or similar
• Platform/ASIC bring-up experience in Linux-based environments using programming languages to include P4
• Advanced experience developing software for or leveraging hardware acceleration platforms like DPUs or NPUs.
• Experience with performance analysis, tuning, and optimization for high-throughput data plane applications.

Preferred Skills & Experience:

• Contributions to open-source projects.
• Experience with AI/ML is a plus, especially for building innovative solutions to improve productivity, solve customer challenges, or drive research initiatives.
• Demonstrated ability to design and develop self-built AI tools or projects will be considered a significant advantage.
• Represented the organization or team at industry conferences, standards bodies, or technical forums.
• Domain expertise in network security technologies (e.g., NGFW, Web Security, Zero Trust, SASE).

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. Simply put - we power the future.

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.