Director, Forward Deployed Engineers - Secure Services Edge

About this role

The application window is expected to close on: 08/16/2026 Job posting may be removed earlier if the position is filled or if a sufficient number of applications are received .

Meet the Team 

The Cisco Security Business Group (SBG) is a powerhouse of innovation, providing a comprehensive, end-to-end security portfolio that includes VPN, Zero Trust access, cloud-based web inspection, firewall, CASB, and DLP.  

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. 

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. 

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 pol

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