Job Description & Details
This is a senior-level, customer-facing pre-sales architecture role where your CCIE badge and scoping expertise directly drive enterprise infrastructure deals. You won't be configuring interfaces or troubleshooting late-night outages; instead, you'll sit across from CIOs and network directors to design massive campus upgrades and data center refreshes.
What You'll Actually Be Doing
Your days will be split between deep discovery workshops with clients, whiteboard sessions with account executives, and translating messy customer requirements into bulletproof Statements of Work and Bills of Materials. You'll lead the technical charge on network refreshes, wireless modernizations, and security enhancements, making sure the pricing and project estimates actually make sense before a contract gets signed. Expect to travel about 25 to 30 percent of the time to meet clients face-to-face, heaviest during the fall and winter months.
The Core Tech Stack
An active CCIE certification—preferably in Enterprise, Security, or Data Center—is an absolute hard stop for this role, alongside a bulletproof background in Cisco routing, switching, and enterprise wireless. Beyond Cisco, you'll need enough multivenor fluency in gear like HPE Aruba and Juniper to talk shop intelligently, but your primary ammunition will be deep, architectural-level understanding of how large-scale enterprise networks actually scale and secure.
Interview Expectations
Expect the hiring team to test your real-world design chops by throwing a complex, highly constrained enterprise campus scenario at you and asking how you'd architect it from scratch while defending your BOM choices. They are secretly looking to see if you can hold a room of skeptical executives with executive presence, translating deep geek-speak into clear business value without losing technical credibility.
Application Advice
Skip the generic system admin fluff and rewrite your resume to heavily front-load your active CCIE status, enterprise presales wins, and direct experience crafting complex SOWs and BOMs. Make sure keywords like Cisco Enterprise Networking, customer-facing architecture, and statement of work generation jump off the page so you easily clear their automated ATS filters.