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. You do not need prior SD-WAN experience; we will help you learn the domain. Your job is to bring strong systems and networking fundamentals and ship high-quality, secure, operable software.

Your Impact

You will own meaningful slices of work in the control plane—design, implementation, testing, and follow-through into production—partnering with teammates and adjacent teams to get to the right solution. Your work affects whether customer fabrics come up reliably, stay connected, and recover when conditions are messy. We expect sound judgment, clear written and verbal communication, and constructive participation in design and code review.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field plus 5 years of relevant experience, or Master’s degree in a related field plus 3 years of relevant experience.
• Strong software development background in C/C++ or comparable systems languages used in performance-sensitive networking software.
• Solid networking fundamentals: TCP/IP, routing concepts, TLS/DTLS (or similar secure transport), NAT/firewall traversal concepts, and systematic debugging of connectivity issues.
• Experience building production-grade software: testing discipline, performance awareness, failure handling, and ownership through maintenance and customer-driven issues.
• Demonstrated ability to work effectively in a large codebase with code review, design discussion, and cross-functional coordination.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with WAN edge, VPN, or overlay networking products (IPsec/SSL VPN, DMVPN, MPLS L3VPN, EVPN, or similar)—transferable to SD-WAN even if you have not used SD-WAN before.
• Familiarity with distributed systems patterns: long-lived connections, reconnect/backoff, state machines, idempotency, backoff under load, and observability (logs, metrics, tracing).
• Background in security-sensitive networking: PKI/certificates, authentication handshakes, least-privilege design, and secure defaults.
• Comfort with Linux networking stacks, concurrency, and debugging in multi-threaded or event-driven architectures.
• Ability to communicate technical tradeoffs clearly, ask good questions in design and code review, and collaborate across teams to resolve integration issues.

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.