Manager, Isovalent & Hypershield Customer Success

Isovalent, now part of Cisco, is the company founded by the creators of Cilium and eBPF. Cisco Isovalent builds open-source software and enterprise solutions solving networking, security, and observability needs for modern cloud native infrastructure. The flagship technology, Cilium, is the choice of numerous, industry-leading, global organizations.

We are looking for a highly experienced and technically astute Manager of Customer Success to lead our post-sales organization across Europe. This leader will manage a team of cloud native and Cisco specialists Customer Success Architects (CSA) specializing in Switching & Networking, Kubernetes Networking, Security, and Observability. This role is critical in ensuring customer adoption, and value realization of the Isovalent and Cisco Hypershield suite of products. This person will bridge advanced technical leadership with customer lifecycle management.

You are technical in nature but also know your depth limits. Lead, mentor, and develop a geographically distributed team of high-performing Customer Success Architects. Develop a culture of innovation, continuous learning, collaboration, and technical excellence. Partner closely with People Team, Finance and Talent Acquisition to attract and retain top talent in cloud-native and networking domains.

Own customer success outcomes including onboarding, adoption, churn control, and technical advocacy across the US and Canada. Enhance current success programs tailored to customer personas and technical maturity. Experience in building digital adoption programs is a plus. Improve and track benchmarks for account health, usage metrics, upsell opportunities, and customer satisfaction (e.g. CSAT).

To an extent, provide technical leadership and guidance across areas such as Kubernetes networking, micro segmentation, security observability, cloud-native and traditional networking integration, and network policy enforcement. Act as an escalation point for complex technical customer challenges and architectural discussions. Be able to rally Product and Engineering teams to mediate customer unhappiness and adoption risks. Partner with Product, Engineering, and Pre-Sales teams to ensure closed-loop feedback and influence roadmap based on customer outcomes. Align with Sales, Product Management, Support, and Engineering to ensure a seamless customer experience. Support go-to-market initiatives and field enablement activities for new product features or services. Advocate for customer needs internally and work cross-functionally to ensure timely delivery of solutions and services.

Own your business. Understand pressure points, key performance indicators and continuous metrics to monitor in order to continuously capture current capacity and future growth needs. Drive operational excellence through adoption of new tools, systems, and processes for managing post-sales activities. Contribute to business planning and quarterly reviews with data-driven insights from customer engagements. Manage team utilization, capacity planning, and forecast resourcing needs. Present monthly and/or quarterly on the overall health of our customers, adoption trends, risks to internal stakeholders.

Minimum Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in customer-facing post-sales roles (Customer Success, Solutions Architecture, Professional Services), with at least 3 years in people management.
• Proven experience leading technical teams in cloud-native infrastructure, Kubernetes, networking, or security domains.
• Solid understanding of enterprise customer success practices focused on adoption, retention, upsell, and expansion.
• Appropriate understanding of Kubernetes networking, the cloud native space and multi-cloud/hybrid networking models.
• Exceptional communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to influence technical and executive stakeholders and ability to manage distributed teams across multiple time zones.

Preferred Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience in technical customer success or post-sales leadership roles, particularly in B2B SaaS, Cloud, or Infrastructure companies.
• Experience working with cloud-native security observability tools, hands-on experience or certifications in Kubernetes (CKA, CKS), major cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), or network certifications (CCIE, etc.).
• Experience scaling customer success operations across Europe.

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.