Sr. Solutions Engineer, Pre-Sales (West)
Senior Solutions Engineer, Pre-Sales (West)
Sales Engineering | United States (Remote) — Pacific, Mountain or Central Region
You'll be the technical lead in Alkira's largest enterprise deals — in the room with network architects and infrastructure directors, owning the technical side of the deal from first conversation through POC to close.
This is a pre-sales engineering role. You'll partner directly with an Account Manager on strategy and carry real influence over what we build next — our Product team treats SE field feedback as a primary input to the roadmap.
Location: Remote, US. Candidates should reside in the Pacific, Mountain or Central time zone for territory coverage.
Travel: approximately 25%, including regional air travel as needed. Please discuss the specifics for this position with the recruiter.
What you'll do
- 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
What you need
- 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
Strongly preferred
- 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
About Alkira
Alkira, a Lumen Connect® solution, is building the future of enterprise networking: one programmable platform to connect, secure, and operate every cloud, site, partner, d