SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Salary: USD 118,079 - 216,482 / annual
Alkira, a Lumen Connect solution, is seeking a Senior Solutions Engineer for Pre-Sales to serve as the technical lead on the company's largest enterprise deals. You will work directly with network architects and infrastructure directors, owning the technical side of deals from initial conversation through proof-of-concept to close.
In this pre-sales engineering role, you will partner directly with Account Managers on strategy and carry real influence over product development—the Product team treats SE field feedback as a primary input to the roadmap.
Key Responsibilities:
- Present and demo the Alkira platform to technical decision makers, from engineers to CIOs
- Articulate the Alkira value proposition and maintain sound understanding of market, industry, and competitive landscape
- Partner with Account Managers to understand customer requirements and pain points; assist with technical requests and RFP/RFI responses
- Scope, run, and win proof-of-concepts end-to-end
- Assist customers with design and deployment based on best practices
- Provide feedback to Product Management on upcoming features from the customer perspective
- Track and drive key customer features and asks through to implementation
Location: Remote, US. Candidates should reside in the East Coast, USA. Travel approximately 25%, including regional air travel as needed.
Requirements:
- 8+ years in a customer-facing pre-sales engineering role (Sales Engineer, Systems Engineer, Solutions Consultant, or Solutions Architect), ideally at a networking or security vendor, cloud provider, channel partner, or consultancy
- Strong networking fundamentals (non-negotiable foundation)
- Deep expertise in routing protocols and technologies, including BGP, OSPF, and static routing, with hands-on experience in route policy design, route redistribution, filtering, and traffic engineering
- Understanding of network virtualization and software-defined networking, including VRFs, multi-tenant network architectures, SD-WAN, and encapsulation protocols (GRE, VXLAN, GENEVE, and similar)
- Hands-on experience with IPsec VPNs, encryption standards, NAT, and secure connectivity architectures
- Good understanding of how enterprises extend cloud connectivity using various networking technologies (Cloud On-Ramps, SD-WAN, IPsec)
- Experience in large-scale enterprise network design and deployment across data center, WAN, and hybrid/multi-cloud environments
- Deep understanding of network services (DNS, DHCP, load balancing, traffic inspection, and similar)
- Ability to troubleshoot live in front of customers across routing, security, and cloud domains
- Excellent written and verbal communication; comfort presenting and demoing to customers in person
Strongly Preferred:
- Understanding of cloud networking constructs across AWS, Azure, and GCP (VPCs/VNets, Transit Gateway, Virtual WAN, Cloud Router, peering, hybrid connectivity)
- Network security expertise, including firewalls (Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, Check Point), firewall policy design, service insertion/chaining, and Zero Trust principles
- Relevant technical certifications (CCNP/CCIE, AWS Advanced Networking, Azure Network Engineer, PCNSE)
- Familiarity with Terraform or infrastructure-as-code for network automation
- BA/BS/MS in a technical field
- Strong passion for sales and creating long-lasting professional relationships
