Meet the Team

The Catalyst SD-WAN Control Plane team builds and maintains the software that keeps the management and control layer of Cisco’s SD-WAN solution working end-to-end—secure sessions between WAN edge devices and the controllers/management plane, orchestration and discovery, certificate-backed identity, and the protocol and state-machine logic that must stay reliable at scale across diverse customer networks. Prior SD-WAN experience is helpful but not required; we expect you to ramp quickly on our architecture and to bring depth in large-scale networking software,security, and operational rigor.

Your Impact

You will own complex, multi-component problems across the control plane—driving clarity from ambiguous requirements, producing designs that balance security, scale, and maintainability, and delivering through implementation, test strategy, and sustained production health. You will be a go-to engineer for hard failures and cross-team integration, and you will raise team quality through thorough design and code review, pragmatic mentoring, and improvements to diagnostics, tests, and tooling where they reduce customer pain.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field plus 9 years of relevant experience,or Master’s degree in a related field plus 5 years of relevant experience.
• Expert-level software development in C/C++ or comparable systems languages used in performance-sensitive networking software, including performance and memory discipline.
• Deep networking fundamentals applied to real systems: TCP/IP, routing and overlay concepts, TLS/DTLS, NAT traversal, and end-to-end troubleshooting across layers and teams.
• Repeated success shipping high-reliability, production-grade software in large codebases: strong testing posture, operational ownership, and sustained maintenance under customer load.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical resolution for complex issues—debugging across components, coordinating with partner teams, and driving fixes to completion.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with WAN edge, VPN, or overlay networking at scale (IPsec/SSL VPN, DMVPN, MPLS L3VPN, EVPN, or similar), including failure modes seen in production.
• Strong grasp of distributed systems behavior under stress: connection churn, partial partitions, backoff policies, state recovery, and observability that supports real incident response.
• Hands-on strength in security engineering for networked systems: PKI lifecycle considerations, threat modeling for long-lived control channels, and secure-by-default configurations.
• Advanced Linux systems and networking debugging: concurrency, performance profiling, packet-path reasoning, and tooling for repeatable diagnosis.
• Track record of mentoring engineers and improving engineering systems (tests, CI signals, diagnostics, runbooks) in ways that outlast individual projects.

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.