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Meet the Team
The AI Center of Excellence for Sales is Cisco's engine for putting AI in the hands of every seller and using it to make every seller more successful. Our mission is direct and ambitious: give sellers more time with customers by taking the non-selling work off their plate and make that time measurably more productive. This role will turn Cisco's best go-to-market plays into seller-facing AI agents that tell a seller — in the flow of the deal — exactly what to do next to win. We do it in close partnership with two teams: the Global Specialist Organization, who owns go-to-market, and the GTM IT engineering team, who we design and build alongside and who runs our AI platform in production at scale. We are small, senior, and close to the field, and we move fast.
This role leads the small development pod at the heart of that work.
Your Impact
As Director, GTM Sales - AI Operations, you will lead a small, senior developer pod that prototypes Cisco's sales plays as seller-facing AI agents delivering dynamic next-best-action guidance — and you will be our Sales-side thought leader, partnering with GTM IT on how the whole GTM technology stack comes together to drive winning outcomes. Specifically, you will:
Digitize sales plays into agents. Lead the design and contribute to the build — alongside GTM IT engineering — of LLM-based agents that consume customer, seller, opportunity, and Cisco sales-process context and generate dynamic next-best-action guidance, replacing dated deterministic logic.
Lead the build pod. Direct a team of approximately three developers, set technical direction, stay hands-on enough to prototype and intervene, and reserve capacity for ad-hoc agentic work as it arises.
Drive the evaluation layer. Build and maintain the relevant golden-case evaluation sets that define what “good” advice looks like — conditioned by segment and geography. This is the program's specification and its institutional memory.
Share the technology point of view. Co-develop the Sales-side point of view on the GTM stack (CRM, Gong, the AI Assistant, account-context data, AI Tutor, and coaching/enablement platforms).
Accelerate ideas to production. Work with GTM IT engineering to take production-ready agent MVPs — with their evaluation sets and a concise intent brief — into production, keeping a defined coupling to their roadmap so prototypes ship rather than pile up.
Build the closed loop. Instrument the full loop: suggest the action, tag the deal, verify whether it was executed, coach along the way, and feed what works back into the evaluation sets.
Be the face. Represent this work with GTM and Sales leaders, sellers, and external audiences; earn trust in the field and credibility with engineering.
Partner across the org. Take the agreed sales plays and business-success definitions from the Global Specialist Organization's Sales Play & Outcomes Owner, and resolve priorities and trade-offs with GTM IT, Specialist Organization and Sales Strategy and planning.
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Minimum Qualifications
A genuine seller's perspective is required. You are a former seller, or you can verifiably demonstrate that you have worked side by side with sellers in the field. Sales-adjacent or sales-support experience alone does not meet this bar.
8+ years of experience across GTM technology, sales engineering, or revenue/sales systems.
Demonstrated experience building LLM or agentic AI applications, including the evaluation and testing of model outputs.
Experience leading or directing a small development team while remaining technically hands-on.
Working command of the core sales and enablement stack: CRM (Salesforce), conversation intelligence (e.g., Gong), seller enablement and learning platforms (e.g., MindTickle, Seismic, AI Tutor), and the integrations between them.
Deep Cisco (or comparable large-enterprise) go-to-market and solutions knowledge.
Bachelor's degree or equivalent years of related experience.
Preferred Qualifications
Demonstrable familiarity with LangGraph and Python.
Forward-deployed or customer-embedded engineering background.
Experience designing sales campaigns or sales plays.
Executive presence, with a track record of selling a technical idea to a senior, non-technical audience and sustaining it through pushback.
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 $200,600.00 to $258,400.00 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:
$243,300.00 - $364,400.00
Non-Metro New York state & Washington state:
$217,700.00 - $327,000.00
* 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.