About the position

Customer Success Specialists (CSS) are a team of extraordinary technical guides whose #1 focus is to deliver an exclusive customer experience. We help solve business challenges with network-centric solutions that accelerate customer and partner success and dedication. Our success is measured through customer happiness metrics, industry recognition, and employee happiness scores. As a team we know that in engineering and customer success, you can only be successful together, so we emphasize a culture of helping each other, working together, winning together and having fun together. As CSSs we help customers adopt and expand Cisco solutions by showing impact on the customer’s business goals. Maintaining an end-to-end lens, we partner closely with Customer Success Executives, Success Programs Managers, sales account teams, delivery teams, partners, and others. This role sits within the Hybrid Mesh Firewall team at Cisco and focuses on Hypershield (open-source and enterprise solutions for the networking, security, and observability needs of modern infrastructure). Our CSS team is a distributed group of subject matter experts in data-center networking, segmentation, and security. We turn a customer’s investment in Cisco Hypershield and the Cisco Nexus N9300 Series Smart Switches into a deployed, fully adopted part of their data center, owning the journey from onboarding through adoption. CSSs are trusted advisors who bring deep security and networking segmentation expertise to ensure customers run reliable production workloads. As collaborators and problem solvers, they readily coordinate across engineering, support, partners, product, and marketing to bring the best of Cisco to the customer. They are also strong coaches, able to distill new concepts and present solutions and their trade-offs clearly. Above all, Customer Success Specialists are exceptional teammates.

Responsibilities

• Own the customer transition from a completed N9300 deployment into the full Hypershield onboarding and adoption journey
• Guide customers through the Hypershield on-premises controller deployment , orchestrating a process the customer’s own team executes across their virtualization environment and the on-premises control plane
• Guide customers in selecting the right operational model for managing security policy — on-premises or cloud-based — based on their connectivity, scale, and multi-site requirements
• Drive value realization by helping customers stand up real use cases: top-of-rack segmentation and enforcement , zone-based segmentation , and secure data-center interconnect
• Deliver workshops and webinars (Accelerators and ATX — Ask-the-Expert) to a diverse set of customers that qualify, tailoring deliverables and driving business outcomes within scope and on-time engagement
• Run workshops and enablement sessions on new and existing capabilities to deepen customer understanding and accelerate adoption
• Inspire customers to make tactical and strategic deployment decisions and track long-term business outcomes
• Drive adoption and expansion of Cisco products by highlighting feature opportunities, winning use cases, and relevant strategies to customers and the Success team
• Build deep technical relationships with key customer stakeholders across both NetOps and NetSecOps , and serve as their trusted advisor
• Identify and clear adoption blockers, collaborating with engineering and support teams to escalate and resolve customer issues
• Collaborate with Account teams, Customer Success, and Partners to elevate customer adoption and address product concerns
• Create reusable assets that scale customer success: workshops, training material, reference architectures, and product documentation that help customers deploy correctly and run reliably in production
• Contribute to the customer community digital spaces and asset development of Success Tracks
• Contribute to lifecycle asset development and maintenance through rotations, asset development sprints, and/or stretch assignments with the Lifecycle Success team
• Contribute to product and offer improvement by providing lifecycle feedback to CX Product Management and CX Success Programs Teams

Requirements

• Cisco Hypershield and Cisco Nexus N9300 Smart Switches , with multiple technology specializations
• Demonstrated depth in Cisco Nexus / NX-OS in production (L3 routing, VRFs, fabric operations); equivalent depth on another major vendor is accepted
• Enterprise virtualization and VM/appliance deployment , able to guide and troubleshoot a hypervisor-based install; vSphere/vCenter preferred (current deployment target)
• Network segmentation and firewall policy design (zone-based or microsegmentation), and the tradeoffs vs. traditional NGFWs
• Familiarity with the NetOps/NetSecOps operating split in data-center security
• Kubernetes and Helm familiarity — able to deploy charts, read node/pod status and logs, manage namespaces and kubeconfig, and troubleshoot a failed rollout
• Experience guiding customers through complex multi-component on-premises deployments
• One major cloud provider ( AWS, Azure, or GCP )
• NX-OS automation and APIs (NX-API, NETCONF/RESTCONF, gNMI, Ansible); Nexus Dashboard a plus
• Proven ability to mentor, coach, and inspire a high-performing team while fostering a culture of accountability and continuous improvement
• Customer-facing experience as a solutions advisor, CSM, PS consultant, or SE, owning the technical relationship and outcomes
• Track record onboarding and deploying solutions into customer production, including guiding a customer’s own team through the work
• Customer Obsessed: You love customer interactions, understand customer needs, and align architectural and vertical expertise to multi-functional teams
• Technical Guide: You explain technical concepts clearly, give clients guidance and vision about the solution, and have a thorough understanding of features and use cases in your aligned technology areas
• Business Aware: You connect technology solutions to business outcomes
• Effective Communicator: You articulate technical features into business impact, talk easily about technology to non-technical people, and are an active listener
• Strong interpersonal skills to navigate team dynamics, manage performance expectations, and resolve technical or interpersonal conflicts through proactive and empathetic engagement
• Ability to identify emerging technologies and industry trends, evaluating their potential impact to keep the team’s technical stack competitive and efficient

Nice-to-haves

• Suggested certifications CCNA / CCNP / CCDP / CCIE, Cisco Certified Success Specialist, CISM, CISSP
• Preferred: CCNP Data Center, CCNP Enterprise, DevNet Professional, CCIE Data Center, CCIE Enterprise, or DevNet Expert

Benefits

• medical, dental and vision insurance
• a 401(k) plan with a Cisco matching contribution
• paid parental leave
• short and long-term disability coverage
• basic life insurance
• 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
• 16 days of paid vacation time per full calendar year, accrued at rate of 4.92 hours per pay period for full-time employees (non-exempt employees)
• 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) (exempt employees)
• 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
• Employees may be eligible to receive grants of Cisco restricted stock units, which vest following continued employment with Cisco for defined periods of time.
• Employees in Illinois, whether exempt or non-exempt, will participate in a unique time off program to meet local requirements.