Senior Director - Product Management (AI)

The application window is expected to close on: 07/19/2026 Job posting may be removed earlier if the position is filled or if a sufficient number of applications are received . Meet the Team The AI Software & Platform Group builds Cisco's enterprise AI platforms and developer tooling, integrating our networking, security, and observability portfolio with modern AI to power autonomous systems.

We maximise reinforcement learning, simulation, and predictive analytics to make enterprise AI accurate, grounded, and trustworthy. Your Impact This is a senior product leadership role requiring a strategic visionary to drive the evolution of Cisco’s AI and autonomous systems.

You will own the end-to-end product strategy, technical direction, and commercial outcomes for our AI platform initiatives. Drive the product strategy for AgenticOps, defining how Cisco’s AI agents correlate signals, investigate root causes, and automate high-impact decisions across IT environments.

Lead the multi-year vision for learning-based models, ensuring rigorous standards for training, evaluation, validation, and safety before deployment. Set the roadmap for simulation and digital twin integrations, enabling customers to validate agent behavior and policies within virtual environments before live production rollout.

Own the platform’s safety, governance, and compliance framework, establishing common patterns for traceability and approval that reduce operational overhead. Direct the development of shared foundations, including context orchestration, Model Context Protocol (MCP), APIs, and SDKs, to accelerate the delivery of agentic capabilities across Cisco product teams.

Advise executive leadership, represent Cisco’s AI strategy in external forums, and mentor senior product and engineering talent to foster a high-performance culture. Drive the commercial go-to-market strategy, partnering with sales and marketing to translate technical AI breakthroughs into compelling enterprise value propositions and measurable revenue growth.

Cultivate a high-impact product organization by encouraging a culture of rigorous data-driven decision-making, operational excellence, and continuous innovation. Champion the "AI-first" transformation across Cisco’s broader product portfolio, acting as the primary bridge between cutting-edge research and product-led growth.

Establish and nurture strategic partnerships with industry leaders, open-source communities, and key customers to shape the global standard for autonomous IT operations. Minimum Qualifications Bachelor's + 15 years of related experience, or Master's + 12 years, or PhD + 8 years, in product management or a related technical field.

Consistent record of taking AI/ML capabilities from research concepts to successful, customer-facing products at scale. Extensive experience in product strategy for reinforcement learning, simulation-based training, or autonomous systems, including managing the technical complexities of sim-to-real validation.

Demonstrated ability to own the P&L and commercial strategy for major product lines, with a history of influencing cross-functional engineering, research, and executive teams. Deep expertise in building and scaling AI platforms, including the definition of public APIs, SDKs, and developer workflows that drive enterprise adoption, domain depth in networking, security, or observability at enterprise scale.

Preferred Qualifications Experience establishing and leading AI deployment safety boards or governance frameworks to operationalize fitness-for-purpose evaluations. Shown success in 0-to-1 category creation and scaling emerging product lines to significant annual recurring revenue (ARR).

Experience managing global product organizations and implementing standardized product processes that improve execution velocity and feature satisfaction. Familiarity with current research in world models, spatial intelligence, and multi-agent orchestration workflows.

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 $280,100.00 to $384,800.00 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 policies: 10 paid holidays per full calendar year, plus 1 floating holiday for non-exempt employees 1 paid day off for employee’s birthday, paid year-end holiday shutdown, and 4 paid days off for personal wellness determined by Cisco Non-exempt employees** receive 16 days of paid vacation time per full calendar year, accrued at rate of 4.92 hours per pay period for full-time employees Exempt employees participate in Cisco’s flexible vacation time off program, which has no defined limit on how much vacation time eligible employees may use (subject to availability and some business limitations) 80 hours of sick time off provided on hire date and each January 1st thereafter, and up to 80 hours of unused sick time carried forward from one calendar year to the next Additional paid time away may be requested to deal with critical or emergency issues for family members Optional 10 paid days per full calendar year to volunteer For non-sales roles, employees are also eligible to earn annual bonuses subject to Cisco’s policies.

Employees on sales plans earn performance-based incentive pay on top of their base salary, which is split between quota and non-quota components, subject to the applicable Cisco plan. For quota-based incentive pay, Cisco typically pays as follows: .75% of incentive target for each 1% of revenue attainment up to 50% of quota; 1.5% of incentive target for each 1% of attainment between 50% and 75%; 1% of incentive target for each 1% of attainment between 75% and 100%; and Once performance exceeds 100% attainment, incentive rates are at or above 1% for each 1% of attainment with no cap on incentive compensation.

For non-quota-based sales performance elements such as strategic sales objectives, Cisco may pay 0% up to 125% of target. Cisco sales plans do not have a minimum threshold of performance for sales incentive compensation to be paid. The applicable full salary ranges for this position, by specific state, are listed below: New York City Metro Area: $280,100.00 - $442,600.00 Non-Metro New York state & Washington state: $267,600.00 - $390,300.00 * For quota-based sales roles on Cisco’s sales plan, the ranges provided in this posting include base pay and sales target incentive compensation combined. ** Employees in Illinois, whether exempt or non-exempt, will participate in a unique time off program to meet local requirements.