Meet the Team
The Silicon & Optics (SaO) QUAD Quality team, part of Cisco’s Common Hardware Group (CHG), operates at the critical intersection of field performance, customer trust, and continuous product improvement. We are seeking a Distinguished Engineer to lead our most complex root cause investigations, translate technical findings into durable defensive design improvements, and serve as the primary technical authority representing Cisco’s quality standards to our executive-level customers.
Your Impact
This is a senior-level technical leadership position for someone passionate about defining and advancing hardware quality standards across Cisco’s high-performance portfolio, including switching, routing, and AI data center compute products.
Responsibilities
- Define and govern comprehensive hardware quality strategies and validation standards, ensuring long-term reliability for hyperscaler, enterprise, and AI data center markets.
- Lead high-stakes root cause analysis and corrective action programs, addressing critical failures across design, manufacturing, and supply chain to ensure both immediate remediation and long-term architectural robustness.
- Institutionalize lessons learned from field and manufacturing failures by championing "defensive design" principles—such as enhanced fault tolerance and design margins—to prevent recurring issues in future generations.
- Utilize large-scale data analysis and AI-driven pattern recognition on field telemetry to proactively identify systemic trends and mitigate emerging risks before they impact customers.
- Advise executive leadership on product roadmaps, represent Cisco’s quality commitments to key customers, and elevate the engineering community through mentorship and industry-wide influence.
Minimum Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree with 15+ years of experience; Master’s degree with 14+ years; or PhD with 10+ years of related experience.
- Experience across board and system failure domains, with a proven track record of influencing hardware design decisions upstream at the portfolio level.
- Extensive experience resolving critical, systemic quality issues across high-performance hardware programs at scale.
- Expert-level skills in leading investigations for the highest-severity customer and field issues.
- Experience applying data analysis at scale—leveraging field datasets, telemetry, and reliability databases—to execute proactive corrective actions.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience leading executive-level technical briefings on root cause, corrective action, and reliability commitments for hyperscaler and large enterprise clients.
- Deep understanding of defensive design principles at the component, board, and system levels.
- Proficiency in physical failure analysis, including non-destructive methods (CT scanning, X-ray, TDR, thermal imaging) and destructive methods (SEM, EDS, cross-sectioning, IC decapsulation).
- Experience with industry frameworks governing hardware qualification, accelerated life testing, and failure rate modeling.
- Knowledge of quality/reliability engineering for high-speed interfaces, power delivery systems, and advanced packaging (liquid cooling, copper cables, connectors), and a track record of industry recognition through patents, publications, or active participation in standards bodies.
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.
