Description
Cloud Control brings Cisco’s products and platform capabilities together in a shared experience for customers, partners, and AI agents. As Principal Designer for Cloud Control Guidelines & Governance, you will steward the Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) that help teams decide what capabilities are, where they belong, what they are called, and how they work together.
You will take the HIG from its first version to an adopted, evolving capability. This is a highly leveraged individual contributor role: you will build alignment across design, product, engineering, Studio, and product organizations without relying on formal authority. You will bring these partners together as an X-Team or guild and create shared decisions and working practices that let teams move with greater clarity and autonomy.
We expect an AI-first way of working. You will use AI tools and agents to expand your capacity across research synthesis, change management, prototyping, content operations, and validation. You will combine that leverage with strong design judgment, relationship building, and clear accountability.
Your Impact
As a Team, we can answer common questions about what a capability is, where it belongs, and what it should be called without requiring a bespoke review meeting. Our shared decisions include clear ownership, rationale, and examples, along with a defined path to revisit them as products and models evolve. The HIG is embraced across participating product groups and is reflected consistently in both human-readable guidance and encoded rules. Our team retains the flexibility to solve customer problems while Cloud Control becomes a more coherent, unified experience. We have built AI-enabled workflows to support a reliable operating cadence and provide reusable ways for teams to find, apply, and continuously improve the guidance.
In this Principal Designer role, you can expect to:
- Lead the evolution of Cloud Control’s Human Interface Guidelines from an initial framework into an adopted, continuously improving capability used across product groups.
- Define and govern information architecture, taxonomy, naming, and experience rules so teams can make faster, clearer product decisions without constant bespoke reviews.
- Establish and run a cross-functional HIG X-Team/guild to drive contribution pathways, decision-making, exception handling, and escalation across organizations.
- Partner with design systems, Studio engineering, and product teams to convert approved guidance into machine-readable rules and evaluation criteria, enabling scalable quality checks.
- Use AI tools and automation to accelerate synthesis, change management, and validation so the governance model maintains a reliable release cadence and measurable adoption.
Minimum Qualifications
- Bachelors + 15 years of related experience, or Masters + 12 years of related experience, or PhD + 8 years of related experience, or equivalent related work experience
- 10+ years of experience in product design, information architecture, design systems, content architecture, or a closely related discipline, including principal-level or equivalent scope.
- Experience shaping information architecture for complex digital products/platforms, including taxonomies, naming systems, conceptual models, and capability placement rules.
- Experience creating or stewarding multi-team design guidelines, standards, or governance frameworks used across organizations.
- Experience applying generative AI, agents, or automation to research synthesis, content operations, prototyping, or quality evaluation workflows.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with enterprise SaaS, cloud platforms, multi-product ecosystems, developer platforms, or products used by internal and external builders.
- Experience building or leading a guild, community of practice, X-Team, or other cross-organizational working group.
- Familiarity with machine-readable design guidance, agent workflows, MCP, skills, evaluation rubrics, or AI-enabled development tools.
- Experience connecting design guidelines to product quality checks, adoption measures, or evaluation systems.
- Experience working across different customer needs, deployment models, regulatory contexts, or levels of product maturity.
- Familiarity with design systems and content governance, including how shared guidance relates to components, terminology, technical architecture, and product-specific standards.
Benefits
- Medical, dental and vision insurance
- 401(k) plan with a Cisco matching contribution
- Paid parental leave
- Short and long-term disability coverage
- Basic life insurance
- 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
- Non-exempt employees receive 16 days of paid vacation time per full calendar year
- Exempt employees participate in Cisco’s flexible vacation time off program
- 80 hours of sick time off provided on hire date and each January 1st thereafter
- Optional 10 paid days per full calendar year to volunteer