Director / Senior Director of Engineering, Zero Trust Network Access
About The Position
Alkira, a Lumen company, is seeking a Director or Senior Director of Engineering to own Alkira's Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) product end to end. This includes the client, control and management planes, and the team that builds them. The role involves setting long-term direction, building for scale and security, and delivering results that grow revenue and protect margins. The level will be determined by experience and depth of expertise. This is a hands-on technical leadership role requiring a leader who tackles hard problems and is willing to rethink foundational choices as the underlying technology evolves.
Requirements
- 12+ years building networking, security, or distributed systems software, including 5+ years leading engineering teams and managers. Senior Director candidates bring 15+ years and experience leading multiple teams or a full product line.
- A 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, and 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, and experience with distributed systems at scale.
- Business acumen: experience weighing engineering decisions against revenue, cost, and margin, and managing an engineering budget.
- Comfort with hard technical problems, and the judgment to change course on foundational technology when it is the right call.
- Clear communication with executives, customers, and cross-functional partners.
Responsibilities
- Own the long-term vision, architecture, and roadmap for ZTNA, and lead transitions in core technologies such as tunneling, transport, and identity as the product evolves.
- Design for scale from the start: customer growth, concurrent users, global distribution, and high availability.
- Hire, develop, and lead engineers and managers.
- Build for scale: tenant growth, concurrent users, global distribution, and high availability.
- Apply zero-trust and secure-by-design principles throughout, and lead threat modeling, security reviews, and vulnerability response for the product.
- Lead development of the cross-platform desktop client, and extend it to iOS and Android.
- Lead the control and management planes: authentication with enterprise identity providers, device posture, session lifecycle, and provisioning across the platform.
- Build in debuggability and self-service so customer admins and support teams can diagnose and resolve issues without escalating to engineering.
- Own production health for ZTNA: SLOs, observability, incident management, and capacity planning.
- Own the business outcomes of ZTNA engineering: partner with Product Management and Sales on capabilities that win customers and grow revenue, and manage engineering budget, infrastructure cost, and build-versus-buy decisions to protect margins.
- Partner with the networking and datapath teams on how access policy is enforced in the network.
- Hire, develop, and lead engineers and managers across the US and India, including bringing work delivered by external partners in-house.
- Set clear goals and hold the team accountable for predictable delivery and results.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
