Director Strategic Alliances Bay Area​/Seattle or San Diego

The application window is expected to close on: 09/27/2026

Location:

San Jose, San Diego or Seattle, WA (Hybrid)

Travel: minimal travel to be expected

The Strategic Alliances team is part of Cisco’s Corporate Strategy organization, and defines the company’s global strategy for our most critical partnerships.

You will operate as a key strategic bridge to our Alliance Partners, to understand their priorities and capabilities and align them with Cisco’s alliance strategy.

You will work with teams across Cisco including product leaders, sales leaders, CTOs, systems architects and marketing professionals to ensure that our global go-to-market and technical integration efforts are synchronized to drive mutual growth.

• Global Strategic Leadership:Define and execute the multi-year global alliance strategy for our most significant cloud partners. Serve as the primary architect for joint initiatives that span multiple geographies and business units.
• Cross-Company Influence:Drive complex initiatives by influencing senior leaders across Cisco’s product, engineering, and sales teams. You will be the catalyst for alignment, ensuring that internal stakeholders prioritize the partnership’s objectives.
• Complex Initiative Management:Incubate and manage high-stakes, cross-functional programs that require deep collaboration to ensure successful product integration and market adoption.
• Executive Presence:Act as a primary point of contact for executives at both Cisco and our partner. Navigate the "coo petition" landscape to secure long-term commitments and strategic alignment.
• Strategic Insight:Provide actionable intelligence to Cisco’s leadership team regarding the partner’s strategic direction, competitive positioning, and emerging technology trends, directly shaping Cisco’s executive-level decision-making.

• Bachelor’s degree (or related work experience) with 10+ years of experience in semiconductor strategy and/or partner management within global silicon for cloud or networking ecosystems.
• Experience structuring and managing semiconductor partnerships, including ecosystem governance and cross-company technical alignment with chipset and systems vendors.
• Technical experience with semiconductor architectures and silicon-to-systems integration, including translating chip-level technical tradeoffs into partnership and business strategy for cloud-native architectures (hybrid/multi-cloud, containerization, SaaS) and security requirements of cloud environments.
• Experience leading cross-functional initiatives and aligning global stakeholders and senior executives without direct line authority.

• Master of Business Administration (MBA) or equivalent advanced degree.
• Experience in management consulting.
• Experience working with U.S.
  
  -headquartered hyperscale cloud providers.
• Experience working within a multinational technology enterprise.
• Experience utilizing data-driven decision-making frameworks with technical and business audiences.

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…