Principal Forwarding Plane Architect - Cloud Networking

Alkira; San Jose (CA); Hybrid; USD 210,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

Alkira, a Lumen company, seeks a Principal Software Engineer to lead and evolve the Forwarding Plane platform. You will own architecture, design, and roadmaps for core packet-processing infrastructure powering Alkira's cloud networking and security services.

You will mentor engineering teams, drive performance optimizations, and collaborate with product and security teams to advance cloud-native networking capabilities across AWS/Azure/GCP.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, computer engineering, or related discipline; Master’s degree preferred.
• 12+ years of software engineering experience with significant focus on networking and systems software.
• Expert proficiency in C.
• Deep understanding of Linux operating systems, networking subsystems, and kernel internals.
• Extensive systems programming experience in performance-sensitive environments.
• Strong expertise in TCP/IP networking fundamentals and protocols.
• Hands-on experience developing high-performance Forwarding Plane or packet-processing software.
• Deep knowledge of NAT, Stateful connection tracking, IPsec, routing and forwarding technologies, firewall and policy enforcement, and network security concepts.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture, design, implementation, and long-term technical roadmap of Alkira's core Forwarding Plane platform.
• Define scalable and resilient networking architectures supporting enterprise-grade cloud networking and security services.
• Drive technical strategy for Forwarding Plane reliability, scalability, observability, and maintainability.
• Establish engineering standards and best practices across Forwarding Plane development effort.
• Design and develop high-performance packet-processing systems and networking services.
• Build and enhance Forwarding Plane components including Flow/Session management, NAT, policy enforcement, traffic steering and load balancing, IPsec and secure tunnel processing, cloud connectivity services.
• Develop performance-critical software in C for Linux-based environments.
• Optimize packet-processing pipelines for throughput, latency, and resource efficiency.
• Expertise in cloud networking across AWS, Azure, GCP and other providers.
• Perform deep performance analysis, profiling, debugging, and tuning of production systems.
• Drive end-to-end performance optimization across the networking stack.
• Leverage DPDK, VPP, and similar frameworks; evaluate emerging technologies including hardware acceleration, kernel bypass, cloud-native networking.
• Lead architecture reviews and mentor senior engineers; partner with product, platform engineering, and security teams.

Skills

Technical leadership

Mentoring

Cloud networking

Networking fundamentals

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/CE or related

Master's degree preferred

Tools

C

DPDK

VPP

Linux

Job description

Alkira, a Lumen company, seeks a Principal Software Engineer to lead and evolve the Forwarding Plane platform. You will own architecture, design, and roadmaps for core packet-processing infrastructure powering Alkira's cloud networking and security services.

You will mentor engineering teams, drive performance optimizations, and collaborate with product and security teams to advance cloud-native networking capabilities across AWS/Azure/GCP.