Engineering Product Manager

This role is Hybrid requiring 2 days in the San Jose or New York office

Meet the Team

AI infrastructure increasingly spans infrastructure across on-premises and cloud environments. Cloud operators and enterprise platform teams must turn that fragmented infrastructure into secure, governed, self-service token factories while managing capacity, policy, reliability, and lifecycle complexity.

We are a small, senior team building a new product inside Cisco in the full-stack AI Infrastructure space. We work closely with design customers and ecosystem partners, move quickly, and make evidence-based decisions in areas where the market and technology are still evolving.

Your Impact 

As a Product Manager, you will own  major product area, a major product area from customer discovery and strategy through delivery, launch, adoption, and ongoing improvement. You will turn customer needs into priorities and measurable outcomes for infrastructure operators and workload teams.

This is a senior individual contributor role. You will establish direction, make difficult product and investment tradeoffs, and lead across organizational boundaries without relying on formal authority.

What You Will Do 

· Define the product vision, strategy, and multi-quarter roadmap for a major product domain. 

· Develop a deep understanding of cloud operators, enterprise platform teams, infrastructure operators, and AI developers through direct customer discovery and design-partner engagement. 

· Translate customer problems into clear product requirements, acceptance criteria, measurable outcomes, and phased release plans. 

· Turn ambiguity into action by identifying the smallest valuable product increment, establishing evidence-based exit criteria, and adjusting direction as new information emerges.

· Lead build, partner, buy, and open-source decisions in collaboration with engineering, architecture, security, and business development. 

· Align engineering, architecture, design, technical marketing, operations, security, sales, marketing, Customer Experience, finance, and partner teams around priorities and launch plans. 

· Define and track product and operational metrics such as onboarding time, deployment success, service reliability, adoption, utilization, customer value, and supportability.

· Own market and competitive analysis, business cases, pricing and packaging input, partner strategy, and go-to-market readiness. 

· Represent the product with customers, partners, field teams, analysts, and Cisco executives, translating complex infrastructure capabilities into clear customer and business outcomes. 

Minimum Qualifications 

· Bachelor's degree plus 12 years, master's degree plus 8 years, or equivalent practical experience in product management, engineering, or a related technical field. 

· Experience owning an enterprise infrastructure, cloud, or platform product through discovery, definition, delivery, launch, and operation. 

· Deep expertise in at least one of Kubernetes, networking, storage, or security, with working fluency across at least two of the remaining domains.

· Experience defining technically complex requirements, including APIs, platform services, lifecycle management, or observability.

· Demonstrated experience creating a product from the ground up, including turning open-ended problems into phased releases, acceptance criteria, and measurable outcomes. 

· Proven ability to influence engineering and business leaders, resolve competing priorities, and communicate effectively with practitioners, executives, customers, and partners. 

· Excellent written, analytical, and product judgment skills. 

Preferred Qualifications 

· Direct experience operating production cloud or Kubernetes environments, including service-level objectives, incidents, upgrades, capacity management, observability, security, and cost management.

· Fluency in AI infrastructure topics such as GPU clusters, accelerator scheduling, workload placement, high-performance network and storage paths, model serving, inference, and infrastructure telemetry. 

· Hands-on breadth across Kubernetes, networking, storage, and security, with technical depth in more than one domain. 

· Experience serving hyperscalers, neocloud or sovereign cloud operators, cloud service providers, or enterprise AI platform teams.

· Experience working with open-source communities, infrastructure partners, or multi-vendor technology ecosystems. 

· Experience developing platform business models, packaging, pricing, or consumption-based services. 

· A record of thriving in startup-like environments where priorities evolve quickly and individuals are expected to create structure, take ownership, and deliver results.

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 $194,600.00 to $285,700.00 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:

$194,600.00 - $328,600.00

Non-Metro New York state & Washington state:

$179,000.00 - $294,000.00

* 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.