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Salary: USD 167,273 - 278,789 / annual
Alkira, a Lumen company, is a cloud networking platform transforming enterprise network deployment and management. We are seeking a Director or Senior Director of Engineering to own the Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) product end-to-end: the client, control and management planes, and the engineering teams building them.
This is a hands-on technical leadership role where you will set long-term product direction, architect for scale and security, and drive business outcomes. You will own the vision and roadmap for ZTNA, including transitions in core technologies such as tunneling, transport, and identity as the product evolves.
Key responsibilities include:
- Owning long-term vision, architecture, and roadmap for ZTNA
- Designing for scale: customer growth, concurrent users, global distribution, and high availability
- Hiring, developing, and leading engineers and managers across the US and India
- Applying zero-trust and secure-by-design principles throughout the product
- Leading threat modeling, security reviews, and vulnerability response
- Leading development of cross-platform desktop client and extending to iOS and Android
- Owning control and management planes: authentication with enterprise identity providers, device posture, session lifecycle, and provisioning
- Building debuggability and self-service capabilities for customer admins and support teams
- Owning production health: SLOs, observability, incident management, and capacity planning
- Partnering with Product Management and Sales on revenue-driving capabilities
- Managing engineering budget, infrastructure costs, and build-versus-buy decisions
- Partnering with networking and datapath teams on access policy enforcement
- Setting clear goals and holding teams accountable for predictable delivery
Requirements:
- 12+ years building networking, security, or distributed systems software, including 5+ years leading engineering teams and managers (Senior Director candidates: 15+ years with experience leading multiple teams or a full product line)
- Record of shipping products and meeting commitments, including taking a product from early stage to enterprise scale
- Strong networking fundamentals: TCP/IP, routing, DNS, NAT, VPN and tunneling technologies
- Strong security foundation: applied cryptography, TLS and PKI, identity and access (SAML, OAuth/OIDC, MFA), threat modeling, and secure software development
- Hands-on systems engineering background in C/C++, Go, or similar languages with distributed systems experience at scale
- Business acumen: experience weighing engineering decisions against revenue, cost, and margin; managing engineering budgets
- Comfort with hard technical problems and judgment to change course on foundational technology when appropriate
- Clear communication with executives, customers, and cross-functional partners
