Alkira is reinventing networking for the AI era. We're looking for a Software Engineer - Backend Engineer who wants to own products from blank page to production — and operate what you ship. You'll build net-new capabilities and maintain the distributed systems behind Alkira's CSX (Cloud Services Exchange). Ownership here means both shipping the 0→1 and maintaining them.
To learn more about our product and who we are, we invite you to take a look at a quick demonstration or visit our website.
What you'll do
- Take product ideas from 0 to 1: scope, design, build, ship, and own them in production.
- Build and maintain large-scale distributed systems for multi-cloud networking — resiliency, scale, and correctness under real customer load.
- Use AI as a core part of how you ship and operate: agentic workflows, LLM-powered dev loops, and AI tooling to move 5–10x faster than a traditional engineer. We expect you to leverage AI, not just tolerate it.
- Design, build, and maintain APIs and microservices (Java/Spring and Go, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes) — treating the stack as a means to ship and sustain product, not the job itself.
- Operate what you build: customer escalations, on-call, telemetry, and bug fixes are part of ownership, not a separate team's problem. You'll also pick up and maintain existing services in your area.
What we're looking for
- B.S./M.S. (or equivalent) in CS, EE, or a related field, plus 2 years of software engineering experience.
- A builder's instinct: you've taken something from zero to shipped before — and you're also comfortable inheriting, understanding, and improving an existing codebase.
- AI-native workflow: you use tools like Claude Code / Cursor / Copilot daily and have a point of view on how to ship faster with AI.
- Strong CS fundamentals and hands-on Java/Spring and Go, distributed systems, REST API design, DB schema design,
- multithreading.
- Linux/kernel fluency and comfort with container + Kubernetes deployment.
- Security-first thinking for distributed, multi-tenant systems.
- Product and customer empathy — you care about why a feature matters, not just how to build it.
- Networking background (BGP, SD-WAN, overlays, cloud networking) is a strong plus.
- Team player: able to work across teams of varying sizes that may be geographically distributed.
- Ability to multitask and support multiple concurrent projects.
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.