Software Product Manager Jobs in California

The application window is expected to close on: 12/14/2026
Meet the Team

The Enterprise AI Platforms& Infrastructure (EAIPI) organization, and specifically the Cloud Management and Operations (CMO) team, is the core engine driving Cisco’s autonomous cloud and enterprise AI strategy. We build, operate, and scale the foundational platforms that power modern cloud infrastructure and agentic AI systems across Cisco.
Our ecosystem spans the RunOn Cloud AI Agent, Infrastructure AI Orchestration, Multi-Cloud Management Platform (MCMP), Public Cloud Governance, Infrastructure Agent and Tool Registry, VM as a Service (VMaaS), and Evaluations Frame works. Comprising elite architects, engineers, UX designers, and data scientists, we are pioneering the transition from traditional, manual cloud operations to intelligent, multi-domain autonomous workflows powered by an agentic operations platform.

Your Impact

As the Principal Product Manager for RunOn Cloud AI Agent, you will own the end-to-end product vision, lifecycle, and roadmap for Cisco’s flagship infrastructure AI assistant. You will translate complex cloud infrastructure capabilities (AWS, Azure, GCP, Private Cloud, Container Clusters, FinOps, SRE tooling) into seamless conversational and headless agentic workflows.
You will define how enterprise users interact with cloud infrastructure—moving from siloed control surfaces and interfaces to natural language that orchestrates several infrastructure goals at once, across multiple domains, with proactive operational intelligence. Collaborating closely with Principal Architects, engineering leads, security compliance officers, and executive leaders, your work will directly boost developer velocity, optimize cloud spend, and establish Cisco's enterprise standard for trustworthy agentic operations.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and drive the multi-quarter strategy and roadmap for RunOn Cloud AI Agent in Jira Align and Jira Cloud, aligning platform deliverables with EAIPI leadership priorities, Cisco IT milestones, and developer productivity goals.
• Evaluate feature requests for their holistic impact across the broader Enterprise AI ecosystem. Push back on fragmented point solutions in favor of extensible, reusable agent contracts and scalable central orchestration.
• Author crisp, actionable Product Requirement Documents (PRDs), feature specifications, acceptance criteria, and quantitative fitness functions. Translate complex technical concepts, such as context management continuity, multi-intent prompt decomposition, asynchronous task execution, token caching) into explicit developer deliverables.
• Partner with Principal Architects, Engineering Managers, InfoSec, Privacy, and Legal to guide architectural proposals through the Architecture Review Board (ARB). Ensure robust Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), multi-tenant data isolation, and enterprise compliance across all agent tools.
• Drive the product definition for Agent Registry and IDE and agent-client integrations. Empower service owners across Cisco to author, validate, and publish validatable agent definitions and MCP toolsets with automated registration and overlap detection.
• Define requirements for compound action orchestration (e.g., account creation → VPC peering → database provisioning) via DAG Agents, incorporating human-in-the-loop (HITL) confirmation patterns, asynchronous background task execution, and proactive notifications via Webex and Circuit, Cisco's enterprise AI platform.
• Establish quantitative benchmarks for latency SLOs (P95 targets), intent classification precision, routing accuracy, and token efficiency. Leverage deep analytics through evaluations to continuously test prompt variations, benchmark LLMs, backends (Foundational Model Service / FMS), and prevent regression.
• Collaborate with UX designers to deliver state-of-the-art conversational experiences across Web interfaces, Webex spaces, Circuit channels, and MyAgent headless integrations, ensuring graceful failure recovery, context retention, and intuitive disambiguation.
• Conduct regular focus groups, user testing sessions, and executive demos with engineering and SRE personas across Cisco. Synthesize real-world user feedback into rapid product iterations that drive measurable platform adoption.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree with 10+ years of technical product management experience; or master’s degree with 8+ years; or PhD with 5+ years.
• Proven success taking enterprise AI or platform infrastructure products from conception through pilot validation to enterprise-scale general availability (GA) serving thousands of technical users.
• Breadth across multiple cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP), Kubernetes, and private cloud, including REST, gRPC APIs, microservices, and enterprise data models.
• Demonstrated ability to write comprehensive PRDs with measurable acceptance criteria, edge-case coverage, and clear business impact statements
• Solid grasp of enterprise security principles, zero-trust architectures, RBAC authorization, tenant data isolation, and compliance standards in SaaS/enterprise environments.

Preferred Qualifications

• Deep technical knowledge of agent architectures, Model Context Protocol (MCP), LangGraph, DSPy, vector databases (e.g., Weaviate), semantic routing, and prompt evaluation frameworks.
• 4+ years dedicated to AI/ML, NLP, conversational AI, or LLM-based agent systems.
• Familiarity with Cloud Management Platforms (MCMP), FinOps cost governance, IT service management (ServiceNow/ESP, Jira Service Management), and site reliability engineering (SRE) workflows.
• Exceptional communication, storytelling, and relationship-building skills to align senior architects, engineering directors, and cross-functional teams around a shared vision.

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:

The starting salary range posted for this position is $194,600.00 to $285,700.00 and reflects the projected salary range for new hires in this position in U.S. and/or Canada locations, not including incentive compensation*, equity, or benefits.
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:
$194,600.00 - $328,600.00

Non-Metro New York state& Washington state:
$179,000.00 - $294,000.00

• 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.