Leader, Customer Support

What You'll Do

· Lead the day-to-day operations of Technical Consulting Engineering (TCE) teams and complete established operational strategies and playbooks across the incident lifecycle.

· Allocate technical resources, workload, shifts, and queue assignments to maintain effective 24/7 coverage for customer cases and support requests within the assigned technology portfolio.

· Own operational performance for an assigned technology domain, product line, or regional customer base, ensuring consistency to service-level agreements (SLAs) and consistent achievement of mean time to resolution (MTTR) targets.

· Partner with engineering squads and tier-2 and tier-3 technical teams to resolve high-pressure outages, drive rigorous root-cause analysis (RCA), and provide architectural guidance where needed.

· Serve as the primary critical issue point for the team's cases and translate complex technical findings into clear, actionable updates that maintain customer trust during technical crises.

· Drive adoption of AI, automation, telemetry, and modern workflows to improve service delivery, accelerate incident resolution, reduce manual effort, and support strategic panning stabilization.

· Provide administrative oversight for expenses, equipment requests, benefits, scheduling, and on-call operations while enforcing internal data privacy, security, and compliance requirements.

· Translate Cisco's strategic priorities into clear team priorities, redirect effort when work is misaligned, and build accountability for high-impact outcomes.

· Develop team capabilities through regular 1:1s, clear feedback, coaching, and a psychologically safe environment that supports meaningful business outcomes through change.

Who You'll Work With

· Technical Consulting Engineering (TCE) and Technical Assistance Center (TAC) teams responsible for customer support operations.

· Engineering squads and tier-2 and tier-3 technical teams engaged in active outages, root-cause analysis, and product improvement.

· Customers and multi-functional partners who rely on clear communication, coordinated critical issue management, and stable technical outcomes.

· Leaders and partner teams advancing Cisco's operational priorities, AI-first workforce strategy, compliance, and organizational change.

Who You Are

· A customer advocate and operational leader who brings urgency, quality, accountability, and sound judgment to critical support work.

· A technically curious leader who can understand the team's domain, guide incident response, and foster disciplined root-cause analysis and continuous improvement.

· A clear communicator who builds trust during high-pressure situations and turns complex technical information into actionable direction for customers and partners.

· A people leader who coaches through change, develops capability, encourages responsible use of AI and automation, and creates psychological safety.

Our minimum requirements for this role

· Bachelor's degree and 7 years of related experience, or a master's degree and 4 years of related experience, or a PhD and 1 year of related experience.

· Previous supervisory or team lead experience.

· At least 5 years of practical experience in the technical domain of the team being led.

· Professional and technical certifications relevant to the role, maintained from before assuming people-management responsibilities.

· Experience guiding a team in the technical aspects of its chartered work.

Desired Skills

· Experience using telemetry and operational metrics to move support organizations toward proactive stabilization.

· Experience integrating AI and automation into team rituals, workflows, and service-delivery practices with responsible-use principles.

· Workforce capacity planning and operational scheduling for global, 24/7 support coverage.

· Incident lifecycle management, high-pressure outage coordination, root-cause analysis, and architectural guidance.

· Knowledge of internal data privacy, security, industry standards, compliance expectations, and change-management practices.

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.