Business Development Manager, AI

This position requires that you work in a hybrid model and are within commuting distance to the San Francisco, CA and San Jose, CA offices. Days per week in the office are flexible. Meet the Team

Join Cisco’s AI & Service Provider Business Development team, focused on accelerating adoption of Cisco’s strategic AI, security, observability, and infrastructure products through partnerships. We work across Cisco’s business units, product teams, sales organizations, and partner ecosystem to turn emerging AI opportunities into repeatable offers, customer adoption, and measurable growth. Our team sits at the intersection of Cisco’s AI strategy, service provider relationships, sovereign infrastructure, and next-generation security.

Your Impact

You will help shape and execute Cisco’s global service provider strategy for AI-led growth. You will focus on building strategic partnerships with leading telcos, neoclouds, AI security partners, and ecosystem players to accelerate adoption of Cisco’s priority products in areas such as AI security, sovereign AI infrastructure, agentic operations, cloud control, SASE, quantum-safe networking, and observability.

You will identify and advance high-impact partnership opportunities with global service providers, helping Cisco create new offers that address customer demand for secure AI infrastructure, sovereign architectures, and managed AI security services. You will work closely with product, engineering, sales, marketing, legal, and regional teams to define the business case, shape partner offers, support proof-of-concepts and early field trials, and drive launch plans that make new Cisco products easier for service providers to sell, deliver, and scale.

Minimum Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in business development, strategic partnerships, product management, technical marketing, or go-to-market roles.

• Experience building or managing partnerships with service providers, cloud infrastructure companies, security partners, AI/ML companies, hyperscalers, neoclouds, or enterprise technology platforms.

• Demonstrated ability to evaluate market opportunities, build business cases, analyze partner or sales metrics, and support strategic decision-making.

• Experience driving go-to-market initiatives, partner enablement, product adoption, or co-selling motions for emerging technology products.

• Strong communication and stakeholder-management skills, with experience working cross-functionally across product, engineering, sales, marketing, legal, and executive teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with neoclouds, global service providers, telco cloud, managed services, sovereign cloud/AI, or regulated industry infrastructure.

• Familiarity with AI security, agentic AI, data center infrastructure, and emerging requirements around security, sovereignty, observability, and operational control.

• Ability to translate complex technical capabilities into partner-ready offers, customer value propositions, and field enablement materials.

• Experience launching new products or partner offers through proof-of-concepts, early field trials, marketing launches, and scaled adoption plans.

• Strong executive presence and ability to influence senior leaders across Cisco, partners, and customers, with comfort operating in a fast-moving, ambiguous market and passion for AI-driven innovation.

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.

Message to applicants applying to work in the U.S. and/or Canada:

Individual pay is determined by the candidate's hiring location, market conditions, job-related skillset, experience, qualifications, education, certifications, and/or training. The full salary range for certain locations is listed below. For locations not listed below, the recruiter can share more details about compensation for the role in your location during the hiring process.

U.S. employees are offered benefits, subject to Cisco’s plan eligibility rules, which include 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. Please see the Cisco careers site to discover more benefits and perks. Employees may be eligible to receive grants of Cisco restricted stock units, which vest following continued employment with Cisco for defined periods of time.

U.S. employees are eligible for paid time away as described below, subject to Cisco’s policies:

• 10 paid holidays per full calendar year, plus 1 floating holiday for non-exempt employees

• 1 paid day off for employee’s birthday, paid year-end holiday shutdown, and 4 paid days off for personal wellness determined by Cisco

• Non-exempt employees** receive 16 days of paid vacation time per full calendar year, accrued at rate of 4.92 hours per pay period for full-time employees

• Exempt employees participate in Cisco’s flexible vacation time off program, which has no defined limit on how much vacation time eligible employees may use (subject to availability and some business limitations)

• 80 hours of sick time off provided on hire date and each January 1st thereafter, and up to 80 hours of unused sick time carried forward from one calendar year to the next

• Additional paid time away may be requested to deal with critical or emergency issues for family members

• Optional 10 paid days per full calendar year to volunteer

For non-sales roles, employees are also eligible to earn annual bonuses subject to Cisco’s policies.

Employees on sales plans earn performance-based incentive pay on top of their base salary, which is split between quota and non-quota components, subject to the applicable Cisco plan. For quota-based incentive pay, Cisco typically pays as follows:

• .75% of incentive target for each 1% of revenue attainment up to 50% of quota;

• 1.5% of incentive target for each 1% of attainment between 50% and 75%;

• 1% of incentive target for each 1% of attainment between 75% and 100%; and

• Once performance exceeds 100% attainment, incentive rates are at or above 1% for each 1% of attainment with no cap on incentive compensation.

For non-quota-based sales performance elements such as strategic sales objectives, Cisco may pay 0% up to 125% of target. Cisco sales plans do not have a minimum threshold of performance for sales incentive compensation to be paid.

The applicable full salary ranges for this position, by specific state, are listed below:

New York City Metro Area:

Non-Metro New York state & Washington state:

* For quota-based sales roles on Cisco’s sales plan, the ranges provided in this posting include base pay and sales target incentive compensation combined.

** Employees in Illinois, whether exempt or non-exempt, will participate in a unique time off program to meet local requirements.