Sr. Solutions Engineer, Pre-Sales (East Coast)
About The Position
Alkira is hiring a customer-facing pre-sales engineering technical lead for its largest enterprise deals. The Senior Solutions Engineer partners directly with an Account Manager and owns the technical side of the deal from initial conversation through proof of concept and close. The role presents Alkira’s platform to enterprise network architects, infrastructure directors, engineers, and CIOs; scopes and delivers proofs of concept; and advises customers on design and deployment best practices. The position also influences product direction through customer-focused feedback and by driving requested features with Product Management. The role is remote within the United States, and candidates should reside on the East Coast. Travel is approximately 25%, including regional air travel as needed. The position requires deep networking expertise, experience in large-scale enterprise environments, and the ability to troubleshoot live in front of customers across routing, security, and cloud domains. Alkira, a Lumen Connect solution, provides a programmable platform for connecting, securing, and operating clouds, sites, partners, data centers, and AI workloads. The company describes its platform as helping enterprise teams build and scale connectivity on demand, apply consistent security and segmentation, and gain visibility across distributed environments.
Requirements
- At least 8 years in a customer-facing pre-sales engineering role, such as Sales Engineer, Systems Engineer, Solutions Consultant, or Solutions Architect; ideally with a networking or security vendor, cloud provider, channel partner, or consultancy.
- Strong networking fundamentals.
- 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 overlay encapsulation protocols such as GRE, VXLAN, and GENEVE.
- Hands-on experience with IPsec VPNs, encryption standards, NAT, and secure connectivity architectures.
- Good understanding of enterprise cloud connectivity technologies, such as cloud on-ramps, SD-WAN, and IPsec.
- Experience designing and deploying large-scale enterprise networks across data centers, WAN, and hybrid or multi-cloud environments.
- Deep understanding of network services such as DNS, DHCP, load balancing, and traffic inspection.
- Ability to troubleshoot live in front of customers across routing, security, and cloud domains.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills and comfort presenting and demonstrating to customers in person.
Nice To Haves
- Understanding of cloud networking constructs across AWS, Azure, and GCP, such as VPCs/VNets, Transit Gateway, Virtual WAN, Cloud Router, peering, Direct Connect, and ExpressRoute.
- Network security expertise, including firewalls such as Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, and Check Point; firewall policy design; service insertion or chaining; and Zero Trust principles.
- Relevant technical certifications, such as CCNP/CCIE, AWS Advanced Networking, Azure Network Engineer, or PCNSE.
- Familiarity with Terraform or infrastructure-as-code for network automation.
- BA, BS, or MS in a technical field.
- Strong passion for sales and creating long-lasting professional relationships.
Responsibilities
- Present and demonstrate the Alkira platform to technical decision makers, from engineers to CIOs.
- Articulate Alkira’s value proposition and maintain a sound understanding of the market, industry, and competitive landscape.
- Partner with Account Managers to understand customer requirements and pain points, address customer technical requests, and help respond to RFPs and RFIs.
- Scope, run, and win proof-of-concept engagements end to end.
- Assist customers with design and deployment based on best practices.
- Work with Product Management to provide customer-perspective feedback on upcoming features.
- Track and drive key customer feature requests with Product Management through implementation.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
