Sr. Solutions Engineer, Pre-Sales (East Coast)

Alkira

25d • $118,079 - $216,482 • Remote

About The Position

Alkira is hiring a Senior Solutions Engineer, Pre-Sales to serve as the technical lead in major enterprise sales opportunities. This customer-facing pre-sales role owns the technical side of the deal from initial conversations through proof of concept and close, partnering directly with an Account Manager on deal strategy. The role also provides meaningful input to product development, with field feedback serving as an important input to the product roadmap.

The position is remote in the United States, and candidates should reside on the East Coast. Travel is approximately 25%, including regional air travel as needed. The role focuses on presenting and demonstrating Alkira’s programmable networking platform, understanding customer requirements, designing and deploying solutions, and working with Product Management to guide customer-requested features. The position requires extensive networking expertise and the ability to establish technical credibility with enterprise customers, including through live troubleshooting and customer presentations.

Alkira, a Lumen Connect solution, develops a cloud-native platform for connecting, securing, and operating clouds, sites, partners, data centers, and AI workloads. The company describes its offering as helping enterprises build 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 at 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.
• 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 multicloud environments.
• Deep understanding of network services such as DNS, DHCP, load balancing, and traffic inspection.
• Ability to troubleshoot live customer issues across routing, security, and cloud domains.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills and comfort presenting and demonstrating to customers in person.
• Candidates should reside on the East Coast of the United States.

Nice To Haves

• Understanding of cloud networking constructs across AWS, Azure, and GCP, including VPCs/VNets, Transit Gateway, Virtual WAN, Cloud Router, peering, and hybrid connectivity such as Direct Connect and ExpressRoute.
• Network security expertise, including firewalls such as Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, or 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 demonstrate sound knowledge of the market, industry, and competitive landscape.
• Partner with Account Managers to understand customer requirements and pain points, support customer technical requests, and help respond to RFPs and RFIs.
• Scope, run, and win proof-of-concept engagements end to end.
• Assist customers with solution design and deployment based on best practices.
• Provide customer-perspective feedback on upcoming features to Alkira Product Management.
• Track customer feature requests and work with Product Management to drive them toward implementation.
• Own the technical side of enterprise sales opportunities from initial conversation through proof of concept and close.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed