Engineering Product Manager

Meet the team:

The Observability Center of Excellence (CoE) exists to ensure the internal incident management process is best-in-class. We run one of the world's largest Kubernetes installations and support critical use cases for some of the most demanding customers, so reliability, operational excellence, and fast, effective response are core to how we operate.

We serve as a demanding Customer Zero for our own products, using them in real production conditions, surfacing gaps, and turning what we learn into product improvement requests and customer-relevant best practices. In parallel, the Developer Experience (DevX) team's goal is to improve engineering velocity while ensuring compliance, quality, and governance requirements are met.

Your Impact:

As the Engineering Product Manager for the Observability Center of Excellence and Developer Experience, you will serve as the product leader across engineering, SRE, design, quality, security, sales, marketing, and go-to-market teams to establish scalable observability practices and elevate the organization’s AI-driven DevX posture through standards, golden paths, tooling, and measurable outcomes.

What You'll Do:

• Own the vision, multi-quarter strategy, roadmap, and operating model for the Observability Center of Excellence.

• Own the organization’s Developer Experience vision and roadmap, defining the principles, golden paths, and success measures that reduce developer friction and improve engineering velocity, quality, and satisfaction.

• Own the organization’s Developer Experience vision and roadmap, defining the principles, golden paths, and success measures that reduce developer friction and improve engineering velocity, quality, and satisfaction.

• Define clear, outcome-based priorities across product, engineering, and operations teams, linking investments to measurable improvements in time-to-market, availability, performance, digital experience, and incident response.

• Lead prioritization and complex trade-off decisions across multiple products and teams; maintain strategic focus while adapting quickly to operational risks and changing needs.

• Partner closely with engineering, SRE, support, and on-call teams to identify monitoring gaps, remove operational blockers, and improve detection, diagnosis, and resolution of performance and availability issues.

• Serve as a trusted technical product and incident-management-process advisor; partner with sales and marketing teams to translate CoE learnings into compelling customer-facing artifacts.

• Establish feedback loops that turn operational data, incident learnings, and internal product usage into product improvements, reference practices, and reusable guidance.

• Foster candid communication, healthy debate, clear decision-making, and accountability across teams working on shared reliability and platform outcomes.

• Conduct market, competitive, and internal-user validation to identify product gaps, differentiators, adjacencies, and new opportunities for the observability portfolio.

• Influence platform strategy across an 18-24 month horizon and align multiple teams around a cohesive product experience.

• Evangelize the Observability CoE internally, creating a community of practice that enables product teams to adopt, learn from, and contribute to its evolution.

Minimum Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree plus 12 years of related experience, Master's degree plus 8 years of related experience, or PhD plus 5 years of related experience.

• Product management experience for complex SaaS, platform, developer, cloud, or observability products.

• Hands-on experience with one or more of: digital experience monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, or application performance monitoring.

• Experience using data, telemetry, and customer or user insights to shape product strategy, priorities, and measurable outcomes.

• Experience leading cross-functional teams through ambiguous, technically complex decisions.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience establishing or leading an observability, reliability, developer productivity, or operational-excellence center of excellence or community of practice.

• Close working experience with teams responsible for performance and availability incident management, SRE, reliability engineering, or production operations.

• Knowledge of software-development and cloud-deployment tooling, such as CI/CD, infrastructure as code, containers, Kubernetes, public-cloud platforms, and developer workflows. Experience with AI-assisted development workflows.

• Experience defining or working with service-level indicators/objectives, alerting, incident analytics, root-cause analysis, and reliability metrics.

• Ability to influence senior engineering and product leaders, align teams around shared priorities, and drive execution with quality and urgency.

• Experience applying automation or AI tools to improve product, engineering, or operational workflows responsibly.

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.