Customer Delivery Architect

Role details

This role serves as the bridge between Cisco's technology and the customer's needs, designing and developing customized solutions aligned with the customer's technology roadmap to solve business challenges. It delivers optimized outcomes by leveraging AI-powered insights and automated design tools, builds customer architecture strategy, and provides strategic technical guidance to help customers align technology decisions with evolving business needs and maximize the value of Cisco's solutions. The position conceptualizes, plans, designs, and leads cross-functional teams across multi-domain architectures, overseeing technical aspects of projects, and develops implementation business impact, risk analysis, and mitigation plans, using data-driven insights and automation for proactive identification and mitigation strategies. The role advocates relevant technologies within its domain, maintaining an AI-informed approach by staying current on emerging AI trends to guide customers on appropriate applications. It collaborates closely with customers, Cisco account teams, and internal stakeholders to ensure alignment across delivery and engagement activities, building deep relationships that support end-to-end solution success, informed by AI-driven customer insights to proactively address needs. The role focuses on enabling customers to successfully adopt, leverage, and scale AI-driven solutions for business transformation, provides limited input to pre-sales scoping activities with a primary focus on delivering sold solutions and reactive support for specific customer requests, and supports solution implementation, advising on renewal opportunities in relation to customer technology strategy. Additionally, the role engages in knowledge-sharing, contributing to best practices, success stories, and intellectual capital within Cisco-particularly around successful AI and intelligent automation deployments-while mentoring and training junior technical resources and creating and delivering training or mentorship programs for new or junior team members. What You’ll Do: • Serves as a technical authority or technical thought leader in relation to providing connected solutions and services across multiple technology domains, with a particular emphasis on architecting and integrating AI-driven solutions to achieve transformative customer solutions • Leads and influences global, cross-functional teams—including PMs, PgMs, SDMs, CEs, TLs, and customer stakeholders—to ensure successful delivery of complex, multi-architecture solutions aligned to business outcomes • Has global and industry sphere of influence, impacting multiple regions, and global initiatives • Shapes and leads strategic engagements with top-tier executives, bridging Cisco’s technology with complex customer needs to drive business transformation, with a focus on defining and realizing the strategic value and ethical implications of AI initiatives • Guides customers through transformative decisions, applying in-depth understanding of evolving business models, lifecycles, and market dynamics • Expands and deepens customer relationships, playing a key role in strategic post-sales activities—including adoption acceleration, expansion planning, and renewals—to ensure sustained success and measurable business impact • Leads strategic alignment of Cisco’s portfolio to the customer’s business objectives and expected outcomes of CX’s engagement, shaping end-to-end strategies that drive measurable transformation and long-term value • Leads the translation of the customer’s technical adoption journey into a strategic success plan, partnering with Customer Success and executive stakeholders to accelerate impact and scale across architectures and business units • Collaborates with senior-level engineers, business and technology leaders to deliver innovative, cross-architecture solutions, adjusting strategies to maximize impact • Shapes and drives the vision for global, multi-domain architecture planning and implementation, leading initiatives that address current customer needs and anticipate future industry disruptions • Proactively integrates AI as a core component for future-proofing and competitive differentiation across the customer's enterprise. • Oversees a portfolio of high-impact, multi-domain projects, ensuring strategic alignment with overarching business goals and orchestrating resources across multiple regions to deliver transformative solutions • Provides strategic guidance to senior executives, shaping technology strategies that drive business transformation, mitigate enterprise-level risks, and uncover additional opportunities to maximize the technology investments for the long-term • Leads innovation and durable growth by embedding AI-driven automation and digitization into strategic customer engagements, enabling transformative and sustainable business outcomes • Demonstrates deep technical expertise across multiple architecture domains (both Cisco and other vendors) and delivery models, including advanced proficiency in designing, deploying, and optimizing AI/ML solutions, data platforms, and security frameworks • Develops technical architecture skills and related knowledge across project teams, mentoring on AI best practices and emerging trends • Guides product innovation and differentiates Cisco’s technology offerings by integrating customer insights, competitive intelligence, and market trends • Drives strategic adoption of AI and emerging technologies to transform customer environments and deliver long-term business outcomes • Cultivates leadership and innovation within and across project teams and customer organizations, fostering a culture of excellence, collaboration, and continuous improvement, championing the strategic integration of AI to drive transformative business outcomes and establish customers as AI-driven leaders • Leads global, cross-functional teams and cross-vendor collaboration, driving strategic alignment and un