Forward Deployed Engineer (SSE)

• Lead the technical relationship on a named set of large and/or strategic SSE accounts, including critical issues end to end.

• Drive proactive account health by improving deployment and rollout planning, configuration and policy consistency.

• Build clean escalations for engineering - timeline, impact, repro, logs, pcaps, redacted configs - and translate outcomes back to the customer.

• Feed recurring customer patterns back into product and engineering roadmaps as concrete requirements.

• Build and support the CX-driven runbooks and documentation from lessons learned and for future SSE deployments.

• Script (Bash/Python) for diagnostics, health checks, automations, and lab reproduction.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Technology, or a related technical field with 10+ years of professional experience in networking, security, or cloud infrastructure; or a Master's degree with 7+ years of experience.

• 7+ years in networking/security with direct customer ownership.

• Experience with DNS, routing, IPsec tunnels, TLS, SAML, SWG/Web Proxy, and cloud networking.

• Experience across zero trust access, VPN, web inspection in the cloud, CASB, DLP, and firewall policy.

• 5+ years of experience with identity and SSO integrations (SAML/OIDC, SCIM) in enterprise deployments.

• Prior experience handling on-premises and cloud security/networking products in production customer environments.

• Demonstrated ability to influence customer expectations and recommend successful SaaS deployment and adoption strategies.

• Experience supporting large multinational enterprise accounts with global SSE or SASE rollouts.

• Ability to work effectively across time zones and cultures in a distributed engineering organization.

• Coding experience with Bash, Python, or similar.

• Ability to advocate for both viewpoints—customer urgency and engineering feasibility—without distorting either.

• Ability to communicate engineering updates to executive and technical customer audiences, and customer context to engineering.

The starting salary range posted for this position is $160,800.00 to $214,100.00 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: