Product Manager - AI Security

The application window is expected to close on: 11/12/2026

This is a hybrid role which requires to be onsite in our Milpitas or Seattle office a few times a week.

Meet the Team

Designs, develops, and manages activities for a specific product or group of products or services from product definition and planning through production, release, and end of life. Serves as the central resource with design, process, engineering, test, quality, and marketing as the product(s) move to production and distribution. Involvement lasts throughout all stages of a product’s lifecycle including modifications, upgrades, and maintenance of the product or product line. Coordinates departmental or cross-functional teams focused on delivering new or upgrading existing products.

What You’ll Do

• Own a meaningful product domain within Cisco AI Defense end-to-end, from understanding customer and market problems through strategy, roadmap, execution, launch, adoption, and continuous improvement.
• Shape a 12–18 month domain strategy grounded in customer problems, market dynamics, technology shifts, competitive landscape, and measurable business outcomes—not simply a collection of features or incoming requests.
• Translate strategy into a clear multi-quarter roadmap with defined outcomes, milestones, success measures, and explicit prioritization choices.
• Develop deep expertise in your domain, including the underlying customer workflows, technical architecture, ecosystem, security landscape, and emerging technologies that shape it.
• Spend meaningful time with enterprise customers, security teams, AI builders, partners, and field teams to understand problems firsthand. Identify patterns across those conversations and translate them into scalable product capabilities rather than one-off solutions.
• Own product discovery and requirements with sufficient technical depth to work directly with Engineering and Design on architecture, APIs, integrations, data models, workflows, and customer experiences.
• Drive technical and prioritization trade-offs across strategic investments, customer needs, product quality, technical debt, and feature velocity.
• Define measurable product outcomes and use adoption, usage, quality, customer, and business signals to determine whether the product is solving the intended problem.
• Operate with end-to-end accountability. Stay engaged beyond requirements and delivery through product readiness, documentation, enablement, launch, customer adoption, feedback, and iteration.
• Provide product and domain leadership in ambiguous and rapidly changing areas. Develop a point of view, use customer evidence and data to make decisions, openly debate trade-offs, and drive teams toward decisions and execution.
• Build strong partnerships across Engineering, Design, Security Research, Product Marketing, Sales, Customer Experience, and other Cisco product teams to deliver cohesive customer outcomes.
• Look beyond your immediate roadmap to identify shared platform capabilities, reusable primitives, integrations, and experiences that make the broader AI Defense platform stronger.
• Contribute to the effectiveness of the broader Product team by sharing customer insights, challenging assumptions constructively, improving how we operate, and helping teammates succeed.
• Serve as a trusted product and domain expert with customers, partners, internal teams, and leadership, clearly communicating product strategy, priorities, technical trade-offs, and outcomes.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree with 8 years of Product Management experience, Master’s degree with 6 years of Product Management experience, or PhD with 3 years of Product Management experience.
• Product management experience building and managing enterprise SaaS products, with ownership spanning product discovery, requirements, roadmap, delivery, launch, and customer adoption.
• Experience with cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, observability, or adjacent enterprise technology domains.
• Experience working directly with Engineering and Design teams to deliver technically complex SaaS capabilities and customer experiences.
• Experience engaging directly with enterprise customers to understand problems, validate requirements, and inform product decisions.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building AI/ML, Generative AI, or agentic AI products, including products involving AI applications, agents, models, developer platforms, or AI infrastructure.
• Demonstrated ability to develop product strategy from customer and market problems rather than primarily managing feature requests or execution backlogs.
• Strong technical fluency and ability to work directly with engineering teams on APIs, cloud architectures, integrations, developer workflows, distributed systems, data models, or security technologies.
• Experience translating patterns across multiple customers and market signals into scalable product capabilities and differentiated product strategy.
• Strong product judgment and demonstrated ability to make prioritization decisions under ambiguity, including balancing immediate customer needs with longer-term platform investments.
• Track record of taking ownership beyond product definition—driving execution, launch readiness, adoption, measurement, and iteration.
• Ability to influence and create alignment across Engineering, Design, go-to-market teams, leadership, and other product organizations without relying on organizational authority.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to simplify complex technical and strategic topics for customers, engineering teams, and executive audiences.
• Curiosity about AI and security, willingness to learn rapidly, and comfort operating in a market where customer needs, technologies, competitors, and security risks are evolving quickly.
• A collaborative working style with a bias toward action, accountability, customer outcomes, high-quality execution, and raising the effectiveness of the broader team.

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 $171,600.00 to $245,000.00 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:

$171,600.00 - $281,800.00

Non-Metro New York state & Washington state:

$151,300.00 - $250,900.00

* 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.