Customer Success Specialist (CSS) — Hypershield & Nexus Smart Switch

Who You'll Work With

Customer Experience (CX) 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.

What You'll Do

As a CSS, you are a guide to the client on your aligned product and architecture. Your mission is to help the customer move to the next phase of the customer lifecycle and to visualize their future in that lifecycle. You will:

Customer adoption & lifecycle

• 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

Technical leadership & relationships

• 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

Enablement & product feedback

• 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

Who You Are

Technology expertise

• 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

Leadership & customer skills

• 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

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

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:

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:

Non-Metro New York state & Washington state:

* 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.