Senior Software Engineering Manager - DPU & AI Cloud Infrastructure

About this role

The application window is expected to close on: 08/31/2026 Job posting may be removed earlier if the position is filled or if a sufficient number of applications are received .

This is a Hybrid position located in Milpitas, Ca. Ideally 3 days per week in office.

Meet the Team

Cisco is building next-generation infrastructure software for enterprise AI factories, neocloud providers, sovereign cloud environments, and modern data center fabrics. These platforms must turn complex GPU, server, network, security, and DPU-enabled infrastructure into secure, multi-tenant AI infrastructure services that are simple to deploy, operate, observe, and scale.

We are seeking a hands-on Senior Software Engineering Manager to lead a team working at the intersection of systems software, Linux networking, DPU and SmartNIC acceleration, distributed security, infrastructure orchestration, observability, and production operations.

You will stay close to architecture, prototypes, technical risk retirement, design reviews, debugging, and quality decisions while hiring, coaching, and growing a strong engineering team. You should be comfortable moving between strategy and code-level detail, between customer outcomes and low-level systems behavior, and between innovation exploration and disciplined production execution.

Your Impact

• Shape the architecture and engineering direction for AI cloud infrastructure and DPU-enabled networking capabilities • Lead a team responsible for core infrastructure software that makes high-performance AI cloud environments deployable, secure, observable, and supportable • Participate directly in architecture reviews, design deep dives, prototype reviews, code reviews, debugging, and technical decision-making • Drive platform capabilities across infrastructure lifecycle, host networking, tenant isolation, policy enforcement, service integration, health, telemetry, and operational workflows • Evaluate emerging technologies, retire high-risk assumptions early, and guide pragmatic paths from prototype to production • Make strong technical tradeoffs across performance, reliability, security, portability, cost, debuggability, and operational simplicity • Build repeatable engineering practices for validation, automation, rollout, diagnostics, upgrade safety, and production readiness • Build a climate of innovation where engineers simplify complex systems, question inherited assumptions, and turn hard infrastructure problems into reusable platform capabilities • Hire, lead, mentor, and retain a high-performing team of technical leads, senior software engineers, and systems engineers • Partner across engineering, product, hardware, firmware, security, operations, and customer-facing teams to deliver coherent platform outcomes

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree + 15 , or Master's + 12 years of related experience with C/C++, Python, Go • 5+ years of supervisory or management experience leading software engineering teams with consistent record delivering complex production software across multiple teams, functions, or product areas • Experience running engineering teams in networking, systems software, distributed systems, security platforms, infrastructure software, or hardware-accelerated platforms • Strong technical credibility, including the ability to participate in architecture, design, debugging, and implementation tradeoffs • Experience leading ambiguous early-stage technical efforts from exploration through production readiness • Deep understanding of Linux systems, host networking, packet processing, routing, policy enforcement, virtualization, containers, and production debugging • Experience with distributed control planes, configuration systems, lifecycle management, and recovery behavior • Familiarity with DPU, SmartNIC, NIC offload, NPU, ASIC, or hardware-accelerated networking architectures • Experience with CI/CD, test automation, observability, performance analysis, health checks, upgrade safety, rollback strategy, and production support • Strong understanding of secure development practices and security architecture for distributed infrastructure systems

Preferred Qualifications • Experience with DPU or SmartNIC platforms, programmable packet processing, kernel bypass, hardware offload, or high-performance networking • Experience with packet-processing and networking technologies such as VPP, DPDK, OVS, eBPF/XDP, tc, SR-IOV, VF/PF, P4 or P4-like pipelines, Kubernetes networking, CNI, routing, or virtual networking • Experience designing or working with network abstraction interfaces, hardware abstraction layers, SAI-like APIs, SDK abstraction layers, or portable control-plane/data-plane interfaces • Experience building or operating host networking platforms, cloud networking services, network security systems, SDN platforms, service meshes, or infrastructure orchestration platforms • Understanding of AI/HPC cluster networking behavior, including RDMA/RoCE, congestion management, telemetry, failure diagnosis, and performance isolation • Experience leading teams where the work required prototyping, technical discovery, architecture choices, and production delivery • Automation or AI-assisted tooling to improve engineering velocity, quality, debugging, and operational readiness

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 re

Similar jobs

• Senior Software Engineering Manager, Core Cloud Compute - AI — Rescale · Remote
• Senior Engineering Manager, AI Infrastructure — Thealleninstitute · Seattle, WA
• Senior Manager, Software Engineering - AI — Netdocuments · Remote
• Senior Engineering Manager, Cloud Infrastructure — Mesh · San Francisco
• Senior Software Engineer - AI Infrastructure — Armada · Bellevue Office, Sunset Corporate Campus
• Principal Software Engineer (Cloud Platform and AI Engineering) — Palo Alto Networks · Santa Clara, United States
• Senior Manager, AI Engineering — Hackerone · Remote
• Senior Manager, AI Engineering — Hackerone · Remote