Director of Software Engineering and Site Lead

The Cisco Distributed System Engineering (DSE) group is at the forefront of developing products that power the largest networks in the world.

As the Director of Software Engineering and Site Lead in India, you will lead a high-performing engineering organization responsible for SONiC development across platform enablement, manageability, control plane, and DevOps.

Your Impact You will partner closely with US-based engineering teams, grow technical talent, and help shape the future of open networking at a scale.

• Lead engineering teams and managers to deliver reliable SONiC capabilities across platform enablement, manageability, control plane, and DevOps.
• Serve as the India team site lead, establishing vision, culture, organizational priorities, and strong collaboration with US counterparts and global engineering teams.
• Own hiring, workforce planning, performance management, succession planning, and retention while building a diverse, inclusive, and high-performing organization.
• Develop engineering managers and technical talent through coaching, career growth, knowledge sharing, and opportunities to lead complex technical initiatives.
• Drive engineering excellence, innovation, customer impact, and active engagement with the SONiC open-source and networking communities.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field, plus 15+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• 5+ years of experience managing engineering managers or leading multiple software engineering teams.
• 5+ years of experience developing or operating network operating systems, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, or control-plane/data-plane software.
• 3+ years of experience delivering production software on Linux using C++, Python, Go, or equivalent systems programming languages.
• Experience leading software delivery across multiple engineering components, including planning, execution, release, and operational support.

Preferred Qualifications

• Master's degree in computer science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or related technical field.
• Experience with networking, SONiC, open networking, network operating systems, or cloud-scale infrastructure.
• Experience across platform enablement, hardware abstraction, manageability, control plane, automation, and DevOps.
• Experience leading geographically distributed engineering organizations of 50 or more employees.
• Contributions to open-source projects, industry standards, technical communities, patents, publications, or conference presentations.