Senior Product Manager - AI Safety and Security (Hybrid)

The posting

The application window is expected to close on: 11/26/2026

This role requires to be onsite on our San Jose office in a hybrid model.

Meet the Team

Designs, develops, and manages activities for a specific product or group of products or services from product definition and planning through production, release, and end of life. Serves as the central resource with design, process, engineering, test, quality, and marketing as the product(s) move to production and distribution. Involvement lasts throughout all stages of a product’s lifecycle including modifications, upgrades, and maintenance of the product or product line. Coordinates departmental or cross-functional teams focused on delivering new or upgrading existing products.

Your Impact

• Own a significant AI Security product domain within Cisco AI Defense, with end-to-end accountability for customer outcomes, strategy, roadmap, execution, launch, adoption, and evolution.
• Shape a 12–18 month product strategy and longer-term vision, integrating deep understanding of AI technologies, cybersecurity, enterprise customers, competitive dynamics, emerging threats, and broader industry trends.
• Develop deep expertise across the AI Security lifecycle and use that expertise to identify new product adjacencies, emerging customer problems, and market opportunities that should shape the future of AI Defense.
• Establish a strong point of view on where AI Security is heading and translate changes in foundation models, open-weight models, agents, agentic frameworks, AI infrastructure, and security techniques into concrete product implications and investment decisions.
• Translate strategy into clear multi-quarter roadmaps with measurable outcomes, explicit priorities, milestones, dependencies, and investment choices.
• Lead customer discovery with enterprise security leaders, AI/ML teams, developers, application owners, risk teams, and partners. Synthesize requirements across customers and markets into scalable product and architectural decisions rather than one-off solutions.
• Develop a deep understanding of the competitive landscape—including where competing platforms and emerging vendors are strong or weak, how architectures and buying patterns are changing, and where Cisco can create differentiated value—and use those insights to influence product strategy and roadmap decisions.
• Work closely with Engineering, Design, Security Research, and Architecture to explore and prototype emerging approaches, evaluate technical feasibility, and turn promising technologies into differentiated enterprise product capabilities.
• Bring sufficient technical depth to evaluate modern AI architectures and technologies including foundation models, open-weight models, AI applications, agents, agentic frameworks, model APIs, RAG, MCP, AI gateways, SDKs, cloud AI platforms, and distributed deployment environments.
• See opportunities to turn emerging AI Security problems into reusable platform capabilities, product primitives, workflows, and ecosystem integrations that can benefit multiple AI Defense domains and Cisco products.
• Drive consequential technical and product trade-offs across security efficacy, customer experience, architecture, scalability, performance, cost, privacy, deployment models, technical debt, and time to market.
• Define measurable product outcomes spanning customer value, adoption, usage, security efficacy, product quality, operational performance, and business impact—and use those signals to continuously refine strategy and investment.
• Influence strategy and roadmap decisions beyond your immediate area, identifying cross-product dependencies and opportunities that strengthen AI Defense and Cisco’s broader AI Security portfolio.
• Create alignment across Engineering, Product, Design, Security Research, Product Marketing, Sales, Customer Experience, partners, and other Cisco organizations around product strategy, architecture, priorities, and execution.
• Serve as a senior AI Security domain leader with strategic customers, partners, ecosystem participants, and Cisco leadership. Clearly articulate Cisco’s product strategy, technology choices, differentiation, and point of view on emerging AI Security problems.
• Help translate new product capabilities and technology shifts into clear positioning and technical narratives that enable Sales, SEs, partners, and customers to understand the value and application of Cisco AI Defense.
• Raise the effectiveness of the broader Product organization through strong product judgment, technical depth, constructive challenge, mentoring, customer insight, and consistently high standards for strategy and execution.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree with 12+ years, Master’s degree with 8+ years, or PhD with 5+ years of related experience.
• Product management experience building and managing enterprise SaaS products, with end-to-end ownership spanning product strategy, discovery, requirements, roadmap, delivery, launch, and customer adoption.
• Experience owning technically complex products or significant product domains and working directly with Engineering, Architecture, Design, and/or Research teams on significant product and technical decisions.
• Experience working directly with enterprise customers to understand complex problems, establish product direction, validate strategy, and drive adoption.
• Experience developing multi-quarter product strategies and influencing execution across multiple teams, product areas, or organizational boundaries.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building AI/ML, Generative AI, agentic AI, cybersecurity, cloud, developer platform, or application security products.
• Demonstrated understanding of the AI ecosystem, including foundation models, open-weight models, AI applications, agents, agentic frameworks, developer platforms, AI infrastructure, and model serving.
• Experience in one or more AI Security domains such as AI governance, AI supply chain security, AI validation and red teaming, runtime protection and guardrails, application security, model security, identity, policy, or behavioral security.
• Strong technical fluency with APIs, SDKs, cloud architectures, distributed systems, AI/ML systems, developer workflows, integrations, and enterprise software platforms.
• Ability to reason deeply about AI Security threats, architectures, emerging technologies, and technical trade-offs and translate those insights into differentiated product strategy.
• Demonstrated ability to identify new market opportunities and product adjacencies and translate emerging technologies, competitive changes, and customer patterns into new products or platform capabilities.
• Experience conducting competitive analysis that goes beyond feature comparison to understand architecture, differentiation, ecosystem position, business model, and implications for product strategy.
• Strong product judgment and demonstrated ability to make consequential investment and prioritization decisions under significant ambiguity.
• Track record of taking ownership beyond product definition—driving execution, launch readiness, customer adoption, measurement, and iteration.
• Ability to influence senior Engineering, Research, Design, GTM, partner, and product stakeholders and drive alignment across organizational boundaries without relying on direct authority.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to move comfortably between deep technical discussions, strategic customer conversations, and executive-level strategy.

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:

The starting salary range posted for this position is $194,600.00 to $285,700.00 and reflects the projected salary range for new hires in this position in U.S. and/or Canada locations, not including incentive compensation*, equity, or benefits.

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:

$194,600.00 - $328,600.00

Non-Metro New York state & Washington state:

$179,000.00 - $294,000.00

* 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.