Director, GTM Sales - AI Operations

Meet the Team The AI Center of Excellence for Sales is Cisco's engine for putting AI in the hands of every seller and using it to make every seller more successful. Our mission is direct and ambitious: give sellers more time with customers by taking the non-selling work off their plate and make that time measurably more productive. This role will turn Cisco's best go-to-market plays into seller-facing AI agents that tell a seller — in the flow of the deal — exactly what to do next to win. We do it in close partnership with two teams: the Global Specialist Organization, who owns go-to-market, and the GTM IT engineering team, who we design and build alongside and who runs our AI platform in production at scale. We are small, senior, and close to the field, and we move fast. This role leads the small development pod at the heart of that work. Your Impact As Director, GTM Sales - AI Operations , you will lead a small, senior developer pod that prototypes Cisco's sales plays as seller-facing AI agents delivering dynamic next-best-action guidance — and you will be our Sales-side thought leader, partnering with GTM IT on how the whole GTM technology stack comes together to drive winning outcomes. Specifically, you will: Digitize sales plays into agents. Lead the design and contribute to the build — alongside GTM IT engineering — of LLM-based agents that consume customer, seller, opportunity, and Cisco sales-process context and generate dynamic next-best-action guidance, replacing dated deterministic logic. Lead the build pod. Direct a team of approximately three developers, set technical direction, stay hands-on enough to prototype and intervene, and reserve capacity for ad-hoc agentic work as it arises. Drive the evaluation layer. Build and maintain the relevant golden-case evaluation sets that define what “good” advice looks like — conditioned by segment and geography. This is the program's specification and its institutional memory. Share the technology point of view. Co-develop the Sales-side point of view on the GTM stack (CRM, Gong, the AI Assistant, account-context data, AI Tutor, and coaching/enablement platforms). Accelerate ideas to production. Work with GTM IT engineering to take production-ready agent MVPs — with their evaluation sets and a concise intent brief — into production, keeping a defined coupling to their roadmap so prototypes ship rather than pile up. Build the closed loop. Instrument the full loop: suggest the action, tag the deal, verify whether it was executed, coach along the way, and feed what works back into the evaluation sets. Be the face. Represent this work with GTM and Sales leaders, sellers, and external audiences; earn trust in the field and credibility with engineering. Partner across the org. Take the agreed sales plays and business-success definitions from the Global Specialist Organization's Sales Play & Outcomes Owner, and resolve priorities and trade-offs with GTM IT, Specialist Organization and Sales Strategy and planning. Minimum Qualifications 8+ years of professional experience implementing, configuring, or managing GTM technology, sales engineering, or revenue and sales systems 3+ years of direct quota-carrying sales experience as a primary seller, or 3+ years of direct field-observation experience working alongside sellers in customer-facing environments (excluding sales operations, sales support, or marketing roles) 3+ years of hands-on experience designing, building, and deploying Large Language Model (LLM) or agentic AI applications, including quantitative evaluation and benchmark testing of model outputs 3+ years of technical leadership experience managing or directing development teams of 3 or more engineers while maintaining active, hands-on coding responsibilities 3+ years of administrative or architectural experience with the core sales and enablement technology stack, including Salesforce CRM, Gong conversation intelligence platforms, and Seismic or MindTickle learning platforms, including API integrations between systems 5+ years of experience executing go-to-market strategies and solution engineering for Cisco or comparable Fortune 500 enterprise organizations Bachelor's degree in a quantitative or technical field, or 4 additional years of equivalent professional engineering experience Preferred Qualifications Demonstrable familiarity with LangGraph and Python. Forward-deployed or customer-embedded engineering background. Experience designing sales campaigns or sales plays. Executive presence, with a track record of selling a technical idea to a senior, non-technical audience and sustaining it through pushback. 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 $200,600.00 to $258,400.00 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, educatio