Customer Quality Engineer | RCA, Customer escalations, customer communication, stakeholder management

Role Summary As a Customer Quality Engineer (CQE) at Cisco, you will serve as a high-level technical authority and strategic partner for our most critical customers. In this role, you will bridge the gap between the Engineering, Global Supply Chain, and Customer Experience organizations. You will be responsible for driving proactive quality strategies as the customer’s advocate, leading high-impact failure investigations, and influencing executive stakeholders through data-driven insights to ensure the reliability and performance of Cisco’s global install base.

Key Responsibilities

• Strategic Quality Engagement: Develop and drive a customer-centric hardware quality engagement model for strategic accounts, ensuring end-to-end visibility and transparency on all quality-related matters.
• Executive Technical Leadership: Lead monthly external hardware quality performance deep dives, providing actionable metrics, comprehensive issue summaries, and expert-level Root Cause Analysis (RCA) discussions for key customer stakeholders.
• Cross-Functional Orchestration: Coordinate complex customer communications regarding corrective and customer mitigation actions (ECO, PCN, Field Notice), serving as the primary liaison between Account Teams, CX, Operations, Quality, and Engineering for these issues.
• Field Mitigation & Remediation: Lead field remediation actions for high-impact events in key customer’s networks. Monitor customer’s in-service and early-life failure activity, and execute tailored mitigation strategies for large-scale, complex network environments.
• Operational Integrity: Implement and track field mitigation agreements, including rigorous monitoring across global service depots and networks to minimize customer risk and downtime.
• Proactive Analytics: Apply advanced statistical methods and data analytics to uncover actionable insights, drive proactive issue identification, and conduct customer site audits to resolve installation and operational challenges.
• Engineering Integration: Partner with quality and design engineering teams to maintain deep, expert-level knowledge of product architecture, failure mechanisms, and quality trends across the customer install base.
• Escalation Management: Provide in-region support for critical escalations, assessing technical impact and executing rapid, effective field actions to resolve high-priority quality issues.

Required Qualifications & Experience

• Education: Bachelor’s Degree in Engineering or related with 8+ years of related experience, or a Master’s Degree or related with 6+ years of related experience.
• Domain Expertise: Extensive, recognized experience in Product or Customer Quality Engineering with a deep understanding of product architecture and complex failure mechanisms.
• Strategic Acumen: Proven ability to analyze the upstream and downstream impacts of technical changes, providing strategic recommendations that improve product performance and reliability.
• Leadership & Influence: Demonstrated success leading multiple high-priority projects and acting as a technical lead in cross-functional, matrixed environments.
• Advanced Analytics: Exceptional ability to apply statistical modeling and data analytics to identify innovative, long-term solutions to persistent quality challenges.
• Communication: Superior ability to influence and align executive-level stakeholders through compelling, data-driven storytelling and clear, professional technical reporting.

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.