Principal Networking Engineer: Fastpath & Security

alkira; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 175,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Alkira, a Lumen company, is seeking a Principal Engineer for the Data Path Team. You will own the fastpath features, implement in C, and stay hands-on delivering high-performance networking code across clouds.

Based across the US and India, you will mentor engineers, lead design reviews, and work with customers to ensure production reliability. You’ll tackle the hardest production issues at the packet and kernel level and participate in on-call rotations.

Qualifications

• Expert C programming with deep systems experience.

Responsibilities

• Own several datapath features end to end from design to production health.
• Design and implement the C fastpath components (VPP/DPDK) hands-on.
• Build and evolve the stateful flow and session engine with NAT and policers.
• Manage secure cross-cloud connectivity using IPsec and overlay tunnels.
• Tune kernel, driver, and packet-path performance for new instance types.
• Lead and collaborate with engineers to deliver and stabilize features.
• Participate in design reviews and mentor other engineers.
• Advise Solutions Architects and customers on network design for reliability.
• Drive root-cause analysis on packet- and kernel-level production issues.
• Share on-call rotations and provide round-the-clock support.
• Leverage AI tools to build tooling, tests, and debugging aids.

Skills

C systems programming

Data plane experience

VPP/DPDK experience

Tunneling & encryption

Network security

Distributed systems

Go & Python

Leadership in delivery

Job description

Alkira, a Lumen company, is seeking a Principal Engineer for the Data Path Team. You will own the fastpath features, implement in C, and stay hands-on delivering high-performance networking code across clouds.

Based across the US and India, you will mentor engineers, lead design reviews, and work with customers to ensure production reliability. You’ll tackle the hardest production issues at the packet and kernel level and participate in on-call rotations.