About this role
The application window is expected to close on: 11/29/2026 This position is remote from anywhere in the USA. Travel of up to 50% within the U.S. and internationally is required.
Meet the Team
Cisco Security Business Group (SBG) is looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) to serve as the technical bridge between Cisco's Security Service Edge (SSE) / Secure Access engineering organization and our Service Provider (SP) and sovereign partners. This role combines deep networking and security expertise with hands-on integration work connecting Cisco's SSE platform APIs to a partner's OSS/BSS stack, including ordering, onboarding, provisioning, identity, policy, billing, and reporting. Cisco offers a comprehensive end-to-end security portfolio covering on-premises, cloud, on-device, and hybrid environments, including VPN, zero trust access, web inspection in the cloud, firewall, CASB, and DLP. This role sits at the intersection of the SSE platform, Cisco Cloud Control, Cisco Financial Systems, and the systems Service Provider and sovereign partners use to sell, provision, and operate the service for their partners and end customers. You will work globally across regions and time zones, partnering with Service Providers, sovereign partners, product management, and globally distributed engineering teams. Travel of up to 50% within the U.S. and internationally is required.
Your Impact
Serve as the two-way technical liaison between Service Provider and sovereign partners and Cisco's SSE product management and engineering organizations. Represent Cisco engineering to partners by clearly communicating technical findings, API constraints, delivery timelines, and platform roadmap trade-offs. Represent partners within Cisco by bringing their OSS/BSS architecture, multi-tenancy requirements, business impact, and operational constraints into engineering and product discussions. Own complex escalations and multi-tenant integration challenges while translating evolving requirements into concrete API contracts, data models, and delivery plans. Take a hands-on approach to implementing and coding middleware and integration solutions that connect partner systems with Cisco platforms. Balance both sides during escalations by setting realistic expectations with partners while providing engineering with accurate, reproducible technical evidence and well-scoped requirements. Advocate strongly for partner outcomes while maintaining technical accuracy and engineering feasibility.
Key Responsibilities
• Lead technical integration engagements with Service Provider and sovereign partners across ordering, onboarding, provisioning, identity, policy, billing, and reporting workflows.
• Design and validate multi-tenant identity and organizational models, including hierarchical tenant structures, RBAC/ABAC role inheritance, precedence rules, and backward-compatible migrations.
• Work across Cisco platform and gateway APIs, including Cisco Cloud Control and Secure Access, to design and validate REST APIs, OAuth2/token-federation flows, and safe, retryable, and idempotent onboarding and provisioning workflows.
• Design event-driven and webhook integrations, including pub/sub patterns, retry/backoff, HMAC signature verification, stable event schemas, and trigger-based automation.
• Partner with billing and platform engineering on usage metering, telemetry pipelines, billing-period rollups, and usage-to-invoice reconciliation supporting usage-based licensing models.
• Define policy-as-code and configuration-management patterns, including JSON schemas, policy inheritance, declarative configuration APIs, and appropriate RBAC scoping.
• Build or specify workflow orchestration across independently versioned ordering, onboarding, and provisioning APIs, including correlation IDs and recovery from partial failures.
• Drive proactive partner health by monitoring integration readiness, configuration and policy consistency, regression testing, and repeat-incident prevention.
• Build clean escalations for engineering, including timelines, impact, reproduction steps, logs, and redacted configurations, and translate outcomes back to the partner.
• Code and script integrations, diagnostics, health checks, automation, and environment reproduction while leveraging AI-assisted development best practices.
Minimum Qualifications:
• 7+ years of experience in security, cloud platform engineering, or integration roles with direct customer or partner ownership.
• Practical experience with REST API design, OAuth2/token-based authentication, and webhook or event-driven integration patterns.
• Experience with multi-tenant identity and organizational data modeling and RBAC/ABAC design.
• Hands-on software development, scripting, or middleware integration experience.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Information Technology, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
Preferred Qualifications
• Experience integrating with Service Provider OSS/BSS systems, including ordering, provisioning, billing/metering, or workflow orchestration platforms.
• Experience supporting large Service Provider, sovereign, or telecommunications accounts.
• Exposure to usage-based or MSLA billing models and metering or stream-processing pipelines such as Kafka, EventBridge, or similar technologies.
• Experience with API-driven workflow orchestration, durable execution, or saga-pattern implementations.
• Experience with observability platforms such as Grafana, Loki, Prometheus, or similar.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure, multi-tenant resource pooling, capacity planning, or cloud cost optimization.
• Experience using AI-assisted development tools to build or deliver software solutions.
• Prior experience managing Cisco on-premises and cloud security products in production partner environments.
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 $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:
New York City Metro Area: $160,800.00 - $253,200.00 Non-Metro New York state & Washington state: $142,900.00 - $246,200.00 * 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.