Business Development Manager, AI

The application window is expected to close on: 10/11/2026

This position requires that you work in a hybrid model and are within commuting distance to the San Francisco, CA and San Jose, CA offices. Days per week in the office are flexible.

Meet the Team

Join Cisco’s AI & Service Provider Business Development team, focused on accelerating adoption of Cisco’s strategic AI, security, observability, and infrastructure products through partnerships. We work across Cisco’s business units, product teams, sales organizations, and partner ecosystem to turn emerging AI opportunities into repeatable offers, customer adoption, and measurable growth. Our team sits at the intersection of Cisco’s AI strategy, service provider relationships, sovereign infrastructure, and next‑generation security.

Your Impact

You will help shape and execute Cisco’s global service provider strategy for AI‑led growth. You will focus on building strategic partnerships with leading telcos, neoclouds, AI security partners, and ecosystem players to accelerate adoption of Cisco’s priority products in areas such as AI security, sovereign AI infrastructure, agentic operations, cloud control, SASE, quantum‑safe networking, and observability.

You will identify and advance high‑impact partnership opportunities with global service providers, helping Cisco create new offers that address customer demand for secure AI infrastructure, sovereign architectures, and managed AI security services. You will work closely with product, engineering, sales, marketing, legal, and regional teams to define the business case, shape partner offers, support proof‑of‑concepts and early field trials, and drive launch plans that make new Cisco products easier for service providers to sell, deliver, and scale.

Minimum Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in business development, strategic partnerships, product management, technical marketing, or go‑to‑market roles.

• Experience building or managing partnerships with service providers, cloud infrastructure companies, security partners, AI/ML companies, hyperscalers, neoclouds, or enterprise technology platforms.

• Demonstrated ability to evaluate market opportunities, build business cases, analyze partner or sales metrics, and support strategic decision-making.

• Experience driving go‑to‑market initiatives, partner enablement, product adoption, or co‑selling motions for emerging technology products.

• Strong communication and stakeholder‑management skills, with experience working cross‑functionally across product, engineering, sales, marketing, legal, and executive teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with neoclouds, global service providers, telco cloud, managed services, sovereign cloud/AI, or regulated industry infrastructure.

• Familiarity with AI security, agentic AI, data center infrastructure, and emerging requirements around security, sovereignty, observability, and operational control.

• Ability to translate complex technical capabilities into partner‑ready offers, customer value propositions, and field enablement materials.

• Experience launching new products or partner offers through proof‑of‑concepts, early field trials, marketing launches, and scaled adoption plans.

• Strong executive presence and ability to influence senior leaders across Cisco, partners, and customers, with comfort operating in a fast‑moving, ambiguous market and passion for AI‑driven innovation.

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,…