Software Engineering

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.