Software Engineer, Solutions Engineering

About the role

The Solutions Engineering team at Cisco plays a meaningful role in accelerating the adoption of Cisco enterprise technologies by building, validating, and improving software-driven solutions across various platforms. This includes supporting high-touch customer engagements, validating real-world customer use cases, developing automation workflows, improving regression coverage, and contributing to AI Assistant intents used to triage customer issues and support successful adoption.

Responsibilities

• Validate real-world use cases, proof-of-concepts, test scenarios, and defect fixes for high-touch enterprise deployments.
• Improve product and solution quality by debugging issues across development, validation, and customer environments, and by converting field learnings into stronger regression coverage.
• Increase execution efficiency and engineering productivity through Python and REST API-based automation for development and testing, automated test frameworks, CI/CD validation pipelines, and daily use of AI-assisted engineering tools such as Codex, GitHub Copilot, Claude, and approved Cisco AI tools.
• Work closely with engineering, product management, field teams, TAC, and customers to identify product and solution gaps, contain field issues, improve software quality, and ensure customer deployments move forward with confidence.
• Translate customer needs into actionable software, automation, and validation requirements.
• Write testplans and familiarize with building, integrating, and testing APIs.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering or a related technical field with 7+ years of relevant experience, or Master’s degree with 5+ years of relevant experience.
• Hands-on experience with campus, branch, data center, or service provider networking, including routing, switching, wireless technologies, network design, requirements analysis, and customer deployment workflows.
• Previous programming experience with Python, REST API-based automation, and AI-assisted engineering tools such as Codex, GitHub Copilot, Claude for network validation, testing, troubleshooting, and deployment workflows.
• Showable ability to create user documentation, deliver demos and presentations, and work across engineering, product, sales, and customer-facing teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Cisco Catalyst Center, Catalyst 9000 switching, Cisco wireless, Meraki, and ISE.
• Interest or experience in using AI tools (e.g., AI Agents, MCP, LLMs) to automate development and operational workflows.
• Experience validating customer scenarios involving upgrades, HA/failover, roaming, segmentation, certificates, and automation workflows.
• Strong test mindset with experience in regression testing, scale testing, and production issue analysis.
• Ability to translate customer needs into actionable software, automation, and validation requirements.
• Familiarity with building, integrating, and testing APIs.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills.

Benefits

At Cisco, we offer competitive salaries, comprehensive benefits, and a supportive work environment. The starting salary range for this position is $152,500.00 to $219,200.00, reflecting the projected salary range for new hires in U.S. and Canadian locations. Individual pay is determined by the candidate's hiring location, market conditions, job-related skillset, experience, qualifications, education, certifications, and/or training.

For locations not listed, the recruiter can share more details about compensation for the role during the hiring process. U.S. employees are offered benefits, including 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. Additional paid time off includes 10 paid holidays, 1 birthday off, a year-end holiday shutdown, and 4 personal wellness days. Non-exempt employees receive 16 days of paid vacation time, while exempt employees participate in Cisco’s flexible vacation time off program. Employees may also earn annual bonuses based on performance.

For quota-based sales roles, the ranges provided in this posting include base pay and sales target incentive compensation combined. Employees in Illinois will participate in a unique time off program to meet local requirements.