Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Alkira, Inc., a Lumen Connect solution, is building a programmable enterprise networking platform that connects, secures, and operates clouds, sites, partners, data centers, and AI workloads. The Senior Solutions Engineer will lead the technical aspects of enterprise pre-sales engagements, presenting and demonstrating the platform, partnering with Account Managers, running proofs of concept, supporting customer designs, and influencing the product roadmap.
Responsibilities
- Present and demo the Alkira platform to technical decision makers, from engineer to CIO
- Clearly articulate the Alkira value proposition and have a sound understanding of market, industry and competitive landscape
- Partner with Alkira Account Managers to understand customer requirements and pain points. Assist with any technical asks from customers and help respond to RFP/RFIs
- Scope, run and win Proof of Concepts end to end
- Assist customers with design and deployment based on best practices
- Work with Alkira Product Management team to provide feedback on upcoming features from the customer's lens
- Track and drive key customer features/asks with Alkira Product Management to implementation
Skills
- Candidates should reside in the Chicago, IL region
- Travel: approximately 25%, including regional air travel as needed. Please discuss the specifics for this position with the recruiter
- * 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 – Everything below builds on this, and it is not negotiable
- * 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 the encapsulation protocols used to build overlays at scale (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 a variety of Networking Technologies (i.e. Cloud On-Ramps, SD-WAN and IPsec)
- * Experience in large-scale enterprise network design and deployment experience across data center, WAN and hybrid/multi-cloud
- * A deep understanding of network services — DNS, DHCP, load balancing, traffic inspection and similar
- * The ability to troubleshoot live, in front of a customer, across routing, security and cloud domains
- * Excellent written and verbal communication, and comfort presenting and demoing to customers in person – In this role you are the technical credibility of the company
- * Understanding of cloud networking constructs across AWS, Azure, and GCP (e.g., VPCs/VNets, Transit Gateway, Virtual WAN, Cloud Router, peering, and hybrid connectivity such as Direct Connect and ExpressRoute)
- * Network security expertise, including firewalls (e.g., Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, Check Point), firewall policy design, service insertion/chaining, and Zero Trust principles
- * Relevant technical certifications (e.g., 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
Benefits
- Commission eligibility as a commissioned sales role
- Remote work arrangement
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