Role: Cisco SD-WAN Subject Matter Expert
Location: Richardson, TX
Employment Type: Contract
Experience: 10+ Years
Project Duration: 12+ Month Contract
"Possible remote up to 3 days per week, but there is a catch on those days, the contractor needs to be available around 8:30 or 9 PM CDT for up to two hours to work with Customer's offshore team."
The Opportunity: We are seeking a highly skilled Cisco SD-WAN Subject Matter Expert (SME) to lead the architecture, design, implementation, migration, and ongoing operational support of a global enterprise SD-WAN fabric. The ideal candidate will serve as the senior technical authority on Cisco SD-WAN (Viptela), drive the full lifecycle of large-scale deployments, mentor engineering teams, establish SD-WAN standards and best practices and ensure optimal application performance, security, reliability, and cost efficiency across thousands of sites worldwide.
Key Responsibilities
- Serve as the ultimate technical authority and final escalation point for all Cisco SD-WAN (Viptela) incidents, outages, and performance issues across the global fabric
- Architect and own the global Cisco SD-WAN overlay design, including control-plane scaling, multi-region/multi-tenant deployments, TLOC extension, and disaster recovery strategies
- Lead large-scale SD-WAN transformations greenfield builds and migrations from legacy MPLS, DMVPN, traditional WAN.
- Define, implement, and govern enterprise-wide SD-WAN policies: centralized/localized data & control policies, application-aware routing (AAR), QoS, traffic engineering, segmentation (VPN/VRF), and security policy integration
- Design and optimize Cloud OnRamp for Multi-Cloud & SaaS, including automated connectivity to AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Megaport, Equinix, and direct SaaS optimization (Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Zoom)
- Build and maintain reusable SD-WAN feature and device templates in vManage; enforce configuration standards and zero-touch provisioning (ZTP/PnP) at scale
- Perform proactive fabric optimization: BFD health monitoring, OMP route analysis, transport path selection, cost-based routing, and bandwidth augmentation with DIA/LTE/5G
- Lead complex troubleshooting involving OMP, BFD, IPsec, NAT traversal, DPI, packet duplication, and integration issues with Zscaler, Palo Alto, Riverbed
- Create and own all SD-WAN operational runbooks.
Required Qualifications & Experience
- 10+ years of hands-on enterprise networking experience
- Minimum 5+ years deep expertise with Cisco SD-WAN (Viptela) in large-scale production environments including migration from traditional WAN to SD WAN.
- Proven track record designing and deploying global WANs using MPLS, Internet, LTE/5G, and DIA transport
- Extensive experience with Cisco Catalyst 8000, Nexus 9K, ASR/ISR routers,
- Expert-level knowledge of dynamic routing (BGP, OSPF, EIGRP), policy-based routing, QoS, and multicast
- Hands-on automation and programmability (Python, Ansible, Terraform, Git, REST APIs, NETCONF/YANG)
- Experience leading network migrations.
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