Customer Delivery Architect (Security)
Role Overview
As aSecurity Delivery Architect, you will provide end-to-end technical and architectural leadership for complex security engagements, translating customer business objectives, security requirements, and technology roadmaps into secure, scalable, and operationally sustainable architectures.
You will serve as a trusted technical advisor to customers, bringing deep security expertise together with broad knowledge across networking, cloud, identity, automation, data, and AI-enabled technologies. You will lead the architecture and delivery of complex, multi-domain and multi-vendor solutions, proactively identifying technical, operational, and security risks and defining strategies to mitigate them.
The role is primarily focused on the successful delivery, adoption, and evolution of sold solutions while also providing architectural input to pre-sales activities, customer technology strategy, and future roadmap discussions.
You will leverageautomation, data-driven insights, and AI-enabled capabilities to improve solution quality, scalability, and delivery efficiency, while helping customers understand how emerging technologies, including AI, can be securely and responsibly incorporated into their security strategy.
In this role, you are expected to demonstrate technical leadership beyond individual projects, influence customers and technical communities across the region, mentor engineers and architects, and contribute to the evolution of Cisco's security delivery practices and intellectual capital.
What You’ll Do
Customer& Architecture Leadership
- Develop a deep understanding of customer business objectives, security posture, technology lifecycle, operating model, and long-term technology roadmap.
- Translate business, security, and operational requirements into end-to-end architectures spanning security, networking, cloud, identity, applications, data, and adjacent technology domains.
- Lead the strategic planning, design, and evolution of complex security architectures across enterprise and service provider environments.
- Provide strategic technical guidance to customers on architecture modernization, security transformation, technology adoption, and lifecycle planning.
- Act as a trusted advisor to senior customer technical and business stakeholders, influencing technology and security decisions through clear articulation of business impact, technical trade-offs, and risk.
- Anticipate future customer challenges and identify architectural changes required to improve security, resilience, scalability, and operational efficiency.
Security Architecture& Risk Management
- Design Cisco-centric security architectures while ensuring interoperability and operational effectiveness across multi-vendor environments.
- Provide deep expertise in security architecture, with strong knowledge across areas such as Zero Trust, Secure Access/SSE/SASE, Network Security, Identity, XDR, Security Operations, Network Visibility, Cloud Security, and AI-enabled security.
- Develop implementation impact assessments, architectural risk analyses, and mitigation strategies for complex and multi-domain environments.
- Proactively identify security, operational, integration, scalability, and lifecycle risks before they impact project delivery or customer outcomes.
- Advise customers on security governance, policies, threat mitigation strategies, architecture principles, and technology lifecycle management.
- Balance security requirements with usability, operational sustainability, business priorities, and customer risk tolerance.
Delivery Leadership& Customer Value
- Provide technical leadership throughout the lifecycle of complex customer engagements, from architecture definition through implementation, adoption, and optimization.
- Ensure delivered solutions meet agreed architecture, scope, quality, schedule, and customer outcome expectations.
- Lead or coordinate cross-functional technical teams across security and adjacent architecture domains, leveraging Consulting Engineers, Technical Leaders, product specialists, and other SMEs.
- Manage technical dependencies and priorities across multiple high-impact engagements while maintaining delivery quality.
- Understand the customer's technology adoption journey and translate architectural insights into actionable recommendations that support adoption, expansion, and long-term customer value.
- Advise on renewal and expansion opportunities where technology modernization or architecture evolution can provide measurable customer benefit.
- Provide architectural input to pre-sales scoping and solution definition where required, while maintaining primary focus on successful delivery of sold solutions.
AI, Automation& Intelligent Security
- Apply an AI-informed approach to security architecture and delivery, staying current with developments in AI/ML, generative AI, agentic AI, AI-enabled security, and intelligent automation.
- Guide customers on the secure and responsible adoption of AI-enabled technologies, considering security, privacy, governance, data protection, and operational risk.
- Understand foundational AI/ML concepts, data architectures, AI security risks, and responsible AI principles sufficiently to incorporate them into security architecture decisions.
- Advise customers on security architectures required to protect AI workloads, applications, models, data, and associated infrastructure.
- Leverage AI-powered insights, automation, APIs, and programmability to improve architecture analysis, design quality, operational efficiency, and delivery repeatability.
- Identify opportunities to simplify and scale customer environments through automation, digitization, Infrastructure as Code, policy automation, and AI-assisted operational models.
- Promote the effective use of AI capabilities embedded within Cisco security and broader portfolio solutions to improve security outcomes and customer operations.
Cross-Functional& Technical Leadership
- Demonstrate deep expertise in security and broad technical understanding across multiple adjacent domains including networking, cloud, identity, automation, data, and operations.
- Lead complex, multi-architecture engagements requiring coordination across multiple Cisco organizations, partners, and third-party vendors.
- Build strong partnerships with engineers, Technical Leaders, product teams, Customer Success, account teams, and other internal SMEs to improve customer outcomes and delivery quality.
- Synthesize customer and field feedback to influence service methodologies, product capabilities, architecture guidance, and future solution development.
- Serve as a technical escalation and consultation point for challenging architectural and delivery issues.
- Drive internal initiatives with measurable improvements in customer outcomes, delivery quality, scalability, or operational excellence.
- Contribute to reusable architectures, methodologies, best practices, automation assets, success stories, and other intellectual capital.
- Represent security architecture perspectives in regional and global technical communities and, where appropriate, contribute to external or industry forums.
Mentorship& Capability Building
- Provide technical guidance, coaching, and mentorship to engineers, technical leads, and architects within and beyond the immediate team.
- Create and deliver structured training and mentorship programs for new and developing technical resources.
- Accelerate onboarding and technical readiness by sharing architecture methodologies, delivery practices, lessons learned, and reusable knowledge.
- Promote a culture of technical excellence, collaboration, innovation, automation, and responsible AI adoption.
- Help develop the next generation of security technical leaders by creating opportunities for others to lead architecture discussions and complex technical engagements.
Success Measures
- Successful delivery of complex security engagements with high customer acceptance and within agreed scope, quality, schedule, and budget expectations.
- Reduced technical, security, and operational risk through proactive architecture leadership and risk mitigation.
- Improved customer trust and satisfaction through consistent, high-quality architectural guidance and technical leadership.
- Increased customer adoption and long-term value realization through architectures aligned with customer business and technology strategy.
- Improved scalability and repeatability of security delivery through automation, digitization, reusable architectures, and AI-assisted delivery practices.
- Demonstrated regional influence through technical leadership, mentorship, intellectual capital, and contribution to security architecture best practices.
- Faster development and onboarding of technical resources through effective mentoring, coaching, and knowledge sharing.
Minimum Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree with 8+ years of related experience, Master's degree with 6+ years of related experience, PhD with 3+ years of related experience, or equivalent relevant work experience.
- Significant experience in customer-facing security architecture, consulting, or complex technology delivery roles.
- Proven experience designing and delivering enterprise-scale security architectures in complex customer environments.
- Deep expertise in one or more security technology domains, with broad understanding across adjacent technology areas.
- Strong experience with complex, multi-domain and multi-vendor architectures.
- Demonstrated ability to translate business and security requirements into scalable technical architectures and actionable implementation strategies.
- Proven technical leadership across large-scale or high-complexity customer engagements.
- Ability to engage effectively with engineers, architects, senior technical stakeholders, and customer business leaders.
- Expert-level technical certification (e.g., CCIE or equivalent relevant industry expertise/certification) expected.
Preferred Qualifications
- Deep expertise across security domains such as Zero Trust, Secure Access/SSE/SASE, Network Security, Identity, XDR, Security Operations, Network Visibility, and Cloud Security.
- Broad understanding of networking, cloud, identity, data architecture, automation, and modern application environments.
- Working knowledge of AI/ML concepts, generative AI, AI security, data governance, and responsible AI principles.
- Experience designing security controls or architectures for AI applications, workloads, models, or supporting infrastructure.
- Experience with automation and programmability, including Python, APIs, Infrastructure as Code, DevNet concepts, or workflow automation.
- Strong knowledge of security, architecture, and IT governance frameworks such as CISSP, CISA, NIST, ITIL, COBIT, SABSA, or TOGAF.
- Understanding of DevSecOps, SDLC, SRE, cloud-native architectures, and modern operational models.
- Demonstrated ability to influence technical strategy beyond an individual project or customer engagement.
- Experience developing reusable architectures, delivery methodologies, automation assets, or technical intellectual capital.
- Advanced mentorship, coaching, and technical community leadership skills.
- Cisco and/or equivalent industry certifications such as CCIE, CCDE, CISSP, CISA, or relevant cloud/security certifications are highly desirable.
- Cisco CDP-2 Training or equivalent.
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