Unpacking My Luggage: How I Discovered Belonging, Scale, and Actual-Time Networking at Cisco

For many of my profession, when you requested me the place I labored, the sincere reply was, “It is determined by the month.” 

My Profession Was a Constellation, Not a Line 

I did what curious folks do — I went trying. I’ve been a founding father of my very own tiny enterprise. A freelancer. A startup engineer. A really pleased R&D engineer inside a 400,000-person consultancy. A product engineer constructing methods for monetary buying and selling flooring. An R&D intern at a significant streaming platform. A voice-core lead at one of many world’s largest telecoms.  

The routine was at all times the identical: arrive, discover the toughest drawback within the stack, and climb all the way in which inside it. From the surface, my resume can look stressed — like somebody who couldn’t sit nonetheless. It by no means felt that approach from the within. 

Beneath each a type of jobs was the identical barely nerdy obsession. You understand the second on a video name when any person freezes mid-sentence and briefly turns into a Cubist portray? Most individuals sigh and say, “You’re breaking apart.” I need to know which hop gave up. However what I genuinely can’t recover from is the opposite ninety-nine % of the time when it simply works. 

Take into consideration what that truly takes. My face and my voice get chopped into packets, handed between a dozen networks which have by no means met one another, pushed via a cable mendacity on the ocean ground, and reassembled into what’s recognizably me on the opposite aspect of the planet, in a few tenth of a second, whereas no one on the decision notices a factor. Fourteen years in, I nonetheless need to know each single factor it took for these packets to make the journey.

That curiosity has propelled me throughout corporations, nations, and continents.

Curiosity By no means Clocks Out 

My curiosity by no means clocked out. I spent late nights on the ground of my condominium, surrounded by signaling diagrams, writing the WebRTC Integrator’s Information — a then-brand-new approach for browsers to speak to one another in actual time — a e-book no one requested for, however one that’s nonetheless cited by engineers and earns royalties to today. 

Across the identical time, I additionally constructed Ramudroid  — an open-source, solar-powered robotic that drives round selecting up litter with a digital camera and a little bit of edge ML. Neither mission was for a paycheck, however each have been proof that the stuff you construct out of pure curiosity can educate you simply as a lot because the stuff you construct inside a job description.  

I’ve by no means as soon as been bored. 

Buying and selling “Solely-One” Standing for Belonging

Each single a type of chapters taught me one thing I nonetheless use. However each was additionally lacking a chunk. Generally I had deep technical possession however no scale. Generally I had monumental scale however no actual possession. And generally I had actual affect, however the components of me that weren’t strictly related to the job description — the e-book, the robotic, the questioner — stayed in their very own compartment, separate from work.

For many of these years, I used to be additionally the one lady within the room. Actual-time protocol work is about as deep as deep tech will get — SIP, ICE, TURN, congestion management — and the rooms the place these choices get made have traditionally been small and overwhelmingly male. I bought good at holding my very own in them. I got here in over-prepared, argued from knowledge, and received the technical arguments I wanted to win. However being the one one does price you one thing, and what it often prices are the components of your self you’ve determined not to herald. 

I needed all three — depth, scale, and belonging. Someplace alongside the way in which I’d quietly determined that was a fantasy.

The Day I Was Handed the Pen

I joined Cisco in 2023, on Meraki’s Safe Join workforce. As a networking protocol developer, my job is constructing the protocol stack behind VPNs — the tunnels that carry a complete firm’s visitors between its places of work, its folks, and the cloud. It’s the identical query, with the stakes turned all the way in which up: how does this packet cross a dozen networks no one controls and are available out the opposite finish unread? Three months later I used to be in a design evaluation, making a case that had been constructing in my head: our VPN tunnels have been selecting paths utilizing guidelines that couldn’t see what the community was really doing at that second. What if the tunnels may weigh reside circumstances and select for themselves? 

I braced for the response I’d been skilled to count on — the well mannered nod, the, “Let’s take that offline,” the concept resurfacing three weeks later in another person’s voice. My lead’s reply was, basically, “Nice — it’s yours.” That’s the second I consider. Not a promotion, not an award. Simply being handed the pen, that early, on one thing that mattered. 

I bought to design the Tunnel Weight Algorithm — a dynamic, condition-aware approach for VPN visitors to decide on its finest path in actual time — and the high-availability structure that grew out of it. That work now runs throughout tens of hundreds of tunnels serving greater than a thousand worldwide enterprises, together with Fortune 500 corporations. I grew to become the acknowledged subject-matter skilled for the protocol stack, and took on Sev1 on-call — the go-to responder for our most crucial incidents — for methods carrying our most delicate visitors. 

All of this, by the way in which, from a small place north of Seattle 🏠. I work remotely, so I spend my days holding different folks’s visitors transferring easily throughout the planet — after which freeze mid-sentence by myself workforce name and briefly develop into a Cubist portray. My house Wi-Fi is deeply unimpressed by my resume. 

That’s the depth and the dimensions I’d been chasing for a decade, in the identical job, on the identical time. And the questions maintain getting higher. Currently, they reside the place AI and networking collide, from AI-aware path choice to recognizing AI-driven manipulation of real-time calls. However the half that really settled it for me is smaller than any of that: I’ve by no means as soon as had to decide on between being an engineer right here and being me. 

In the identical stretch of years, I’ve been capable of develop as a multidimensional builder. I designed, I programmed, re-architected features of Cisco Safe Join and watched it develop, filed patents, printed IETF Web-Drafts, and spoke at conferences — generally in the identical week. I’ve judged pupil science festivals, coached robotics college students, and mentored interns. No one requested me to choose a lane. 

I’ve collected over two dozen recognition awards to this point right here at Cisco, however the one meaning essentially the most isn’t on any wall. It’s logging on every morning figuring out that the entire, wide-ranging relentless questioner, over-curious model of me is the model they really needed. There’s no separate compartment.

Unpacking My Luggage 

If you happen to’d instructed my youthful self — the one bootstrapping a product, freelancing between gigs, hopping between startups and giants — that each one of it was preparation, I’m undecided I’d have believed you. It felt like wandering. It turned out to be a map. 

Each place that didn’t fairly match taught me precisely what I used to be in search of. After I lastly discovered a workforce the place protocol design, international affect, and real belonging all confirmed up in the identical job, I ended trying. 

In case your resume appears to be like extra like a constellation than a straight line — particularly when you’re a girl who’s been the one one within the room, questioning if the “actual you” and the “employable you” should be completely different folks — I need you to know they are often the identical individual. 

Fourteen years. Seven corporations. One query. Cisco is the place I lastly unpacked my luggage. 

Able to discover a workforce the place you don’t have to decide on between skilled development and being your self? Discover your subsequent chapter on the Cisco Careers website.

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