Cisco SD-WAN Subject Matter Expert

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.