Cisco Solutions Engineer / Mid-Market Commercial / Chicago

I turn complex infrastructure into clear business decisions.

I’m Jack Riebel, a Solutions Engineer at Cisco working with mid-market commercial teams across networking, security, automation, and AI. My favorite part of the job is translating between two worlds: the business question leaders are asking and the technical systems that actually hold the answer.

This site is where I publish field briefs, technical experiments, and practical notes on the operating-model shifts I’m seeing in the market.

What I do

I sit between technical depth and business urgency.

Most infrastructure conversations are not really about a product. They are about risk, growth, user experience, security, cost, and speed. My work is helping make those tradeoffs visible.

At Cisco, I collaborate with mid-market leaders and technical teams to think through networking, security, and automation decisions. Sometimes that means explaining an architecture. Sometimes it means helping a team pressure-test a roadmap. Sometimes it means turning a messy operational problem into a clearer path forward.

My background in computer science keeps me close to the technical side: code, data, APIs, cloud tools, AI workflows, and how systems actually behave. My customer-facing work keeps me grounded in the business side: what matters, what is realistic, and what helps a team move.

01 Translate clearly

Connect executive questions to the telemetry, tools, and architecture underneath.

02 Build to understand

Use public projects and prototypes to test ideas instead of only talking about them.

03 Keep the customer in view

Frame technology around outcomes: resilience, productivity, security, and speed.

Start here

What I’m working on in public

The writing, builds, and conversations here are how I test ideas in the open and make fast-moving infrastructure shifts easier to reason about.

Current lane AI, secure networking, automation, and the operating model shift behind modern infrastructure.