Senior Platform Services Software Engineer

The Role

Alkira is transforming networking through its Network Infrastructure as a Service (NIaaS) platform, enabling enterprises to build and operate global cloud networks with simplicity, scale, and agility. We are seeking a Senior Platform Services Software Engineer to design and build the core constructs that Alkira's engineering teams build on.

This role is for a software engineer first. Platform Services does not own customer-facing features. We build the shared backend services, APIs, and primitives other engineering teams depend on, and we expose the platform tooling — SDKs, clients, CLIs, and self-service interfaces — they use to work with them. Your users are engineers, and your leverage comes from that: a well-designed construct is adopted across many teams, and a poorly designed one is worked around by all of them.

You will own complex projects, contribute to architectural decisions to turn what teams need into production-quality platform capability. This is not an infrastructure management, DevOps, or SRE role.
Responsibilities
- Design, develop, test, and maintain scalable backend services, APIs, and platform capabilities using Golang.

- Build cloud-native microservices and distributed primitives consumed by other engineering teams, over gRPC and Protobuf.

- Build and maintain the platform tooling other teams are using and treat their ergonomics as part of the product.

- Own complex features from design through implementation, deployment, and production support.

- Contribute to architectural decisions that improve scalability, reliability, performance, and maintainability across every team depending on the platform.

- Diagnose and resolve complex software issues across Linux-based development and production environments.

- Turn recurring patterns across teams into shared capability rather than repeated one-off support.

- Mentor engineers through code review and technical guidance, and contribute to development standards, automated testing, and security review of Platform-owned services.

- Participate in the on-call rotation for the services you own.

Minimum Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, or a related technical field.

- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience building production-scale applications and services.

- Strong proficiency in Golang with experience developing production-quality backend systems.

- Experience designing and building APIs, microservices, and distributed systems.

- Strong experience with Linux development environments, troubleshooting, and system-level debugging.

- Experience designing interfaces other engineers consume, and evident care for their ergonomics, stability, and documentation.

- Experience developing software for cloud environments, including GCP, AWS, or Azure.

- Strong technical judgment, problem-solving, collaboration, and communication skills.

Preferred
- Temporal, or comparable durable workflow engines (Cadence, Step Functions). A meaningful share of our orchestration work fits this model.

- Experience on an internal platform, developer platform, or shared services team where the users were other engineers.

- Building developer tooling: SDKs, code generation, CLIs.

- Kubernetes, containers, and cloud-native application architectures.

- Carrying production on-call for services you built.

- Strong understanding of software design patterns, performance optimization, automated testing, and system reliability.

- Background in networking, cloud infrastructure, telecommunications, or enterprise SaaS platforms.

About Alkira

Alkira, a Lumen company, is building the future of enterprise networking: one programmable platform to connect, secure, and operate every cloud, site, partner, data center, and AI workload. Founded by Amir and Atif Khan, the creators of Viptela and pioneers of the SD-WAN market, Alkira was built to