About This Role
This engineering management role leads a high-performing team in quality engineering for Cisco's Routing and SD-WAN platforms. The manager will define test strategy, drive automation, and establish engineering practices to enhance software quality throughout the development lifecycle, partnering closely with development, product management, and release teams.
Responsibilities
- Lead and mentor a team of software test engineers focused on Routing and SD-WAN platforms
- Define comprehensive test strategies covering functional, scale, performance, resiliency, interoperability, upgrade, and regression testing
- Drive the development of automation frameworks, reusable test libraries, and CI/CD-integrated testing pipelines
- Improve engineering efficiency through lab automation, topology orchestration, simulation, and infrastructure optimization
- Establish quality metrics, automation coverage goals, defect trends, and release readiness criteria
- Validate complex networking technologies across routing protocols, SD-WAN control and data planes, high availability, security, and cloud connectivity
- Collaborate with cross-functional engineering leaders to manage technical priorities, customer escalations, and release execution
- Build a culture of continuous quality improvement, technical excellence, and engineering ownership
Requirements
- 12+ years of experience in software quality engineering or test engineering, including experience leading engineering teams
- Proven experience managing and mentoring high-performing software test or quality engineering organizations
- Deep understanding of Layer 2/Layer 3 networking, including routing, switching, TCP/IP, VPNs, overlays, tunneling, QoS, security, and high availability
- Strong hands-on expertise with routing protocols such as BGP, OSPF, IS-IS, multicast, or related technologies
- Experience validating Routing, SD-WAN, enterprise networking, edge platforms, cloud connectivity, or network orchestration solutions
- Strong automation experience using Python, Robot Framework, PyTest, Go, or similar technologies
- Experience designing and scaling automation frameworks, CI/CD-integrated testing, lab automation, and test infrastructure
- Strong analytical and debugging skills across distributed systems, control plane, data plane, and management plane architectures
- Excellent leadership, communication, stakeholder management, and project planning skills
Nice to have:
- Experience with Cisco networking technologies including IOS-XE, Catalyst, Meraki, Viptela, Routing, or SD-WAN platforms
- Familiarity with cloud-native technologies including Kubernetes, containers, virtualization, and AWS, Azure, or GCP networking services
