The preferred location for this position is San Jose, California or North Carolina, operating under a hybrid work model, though we are open to flexible, US-based hybrid arrangements for the right candidate.

Meet the Team

Cisco is seeking a Senior Manager to build and lead an enterprise Infrastructure Efficiency and Capacity Management practice across compute, accelerated compute (GPU/TPU), storage, and Cloud/PaaS/Kubernetes platforms. This team establishes the core operating model connecting workload demand, usable capacity, hardware lifecycles, and unit economics to drive strategic investment and allocation decisions for senior leadership. You will lead an independent, highly analytical practice that turns complex telemetry into clear infrastructure decisions while partnering closely with accountable platform and service owners who retain architectural and operational delivery. If you are excited by the challenge of optimizing massive, hyper-scale AI and enterprise infrastructure at global scale, this is the team for you.

Your Impact

As the Senior Manager of Infrastructure Efficiency & Capacity Management, you will establish and direct an engineering and analytics organization responsible for multi-million dollar infrastructure planning, workload placement, and lifecycle economics. You will implement evidence-based decision frameworks that ensure major hardware investments, cloud commitments, and data center expansions are driven by disciplined forecasting and rigorous total cost of ownership (TCO) modeling. In this executive-facing role, you will bridge technical platform engineering with financial accountability, ensuring our global infrastructure scales reliably, securely, and efficiently.

Key Responsibilities:

• Build and lead a high-caliber team of engineers and analysts specializing in capacity economics, infrastructure data analytics, compute, and platform efficiency.
• Establish a repeatable operating model for demand forecasting, unit economics, supply allocation, opportunity tracking, and closed-loop outcome verification across Jira and ServiceNow.
• Direct independent, evidence-based evaluations of material infrastructure purchases, cloud expansions, and hardware refreshes using defined demand signals, utilization metrics, and TCO models.
• Govern cross-domain efficiency strategies including workload placement, right-sizing, hardware reuse, lifecycle refresh timing, and cloud financial commitments (e.g., Savings Plans, Reserved Instances).
• Partner with Corporate Finance to enforce rigorous evidence standards, verifying bottom-line realized savings, cost avoidance, and capacity reclamation without double counting.
• Communicate strategic recommendations, technical trade-offs, and investment risks clearly to executive leadership and cross-functional engineering teams.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Information Systems, Business Administration, or a related technical field (or equivalent practical experience), plus 12+ years of professional experience in infrastructure engineering, cloud/platform systems, technical operations, or enterprise capacity planning.
• 5+ years of direct experience building, managing, and leading high-performing teams of senior technical specialists (e.g., staff/principal engineers, systems architects, or technical managers).
• Demonstrated experience directing infrastructure capacity planning, hardware/cloud resource lifecycles, workload utilization modeling, and service continuity across large-scale, multi-service technical environments.
• Hands-on experience developing, governing, or implementing quantitative capacity models, demand forecasts, scenario analyses, unit economics, or multi-million dollar Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) / Capital Expenditure (CapEx/OpEx) business cases.
• Proven experience evaluating technical system architectures and governing technical investment decisions in partnership with cross-functional leadership across engineering, finance, procurement, and operations.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with infrastructure supply-and-demand planning, refresh justification, capacity forecasting, or FinOps.
• Experience modeling cloud commitments such as Savings Plans or Reserved Instances.
• Familiarity with compute virtualization, Kubernetes, accelerated compute, GPU/TPU environments, storage, databases, or platform services.
• Experience using operational and financial data from systems such as observability platforms, virtualization platforms, Kubernetes environments, cloud billing systems, Jira, or ServiceNow.
• Experience establishing governance, policy-as-code, decision records, scorecards, or closed-loop operating rhythms.
• Experience validating savings, cost avoidance, utilization improvements, or capacity outcomes with Finance.

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.