Senior Customer Engineer, Strategic - San Francisco

Cloudflare is seeking a Senior Customer Engineer to drive technical go-to-market strategy, serving as a trusted technical advisor and primary architect of the customer journey. This role bridges technical strategy and business value, guiding enterprise clients from pre-sales technical validation through onboarding, deployment architecture, and full lifecycle expansion. The Customer Engineer operates as a quota-carrying technologist, leveraging AI-augmented workflows to focus on high-value architectural design and measurable business outcomes.

• Lead technical deep-dive discovery, capture business requirements, and map complex customer infrastructure (DNS, CDN, Zero Trust, Network Security, Workers) to Cloudflare architectures.
• Define and scope success criteria and technical evaluation plans for Proofs of Concept (PoCs) and Technical Validations.
• Deliver tailored technical presentations, architectural diagrams, and demonstrations addressing performance, security, and reliability challenges.
• Provide oversight to technical onboarding and implementation, designing migration and onboarding blueprints (e.g., DNS migrations, Zero Trust rollouts, WAF tuning).
• Carry a variable quota tied to new business acquisition and account growth; lead technical Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs).
• Act as a trusted technical advisor throughout the customer lifecycle, identifying risks and providing remediation strategies.
• Leverage AI agents, LLMs, and internal platforms to automate routine tasks such as RFP responses and telemetry monitoring.
• Partner with the Enablement Team to design, build, and govern technical resources and educate internal teams and customers.

• Experience in a customer-facing technical role (Solutions Engineering, Customer Engineering, Professional Services, Sales Engineering, Technical Account Management, or Forward Deployed Engineer).
• Ability to white-board, design, and articulate complex enterprise network and security architectures.
• Excellent communication skills to translate technical concepts into business outcomes for engineers and C-level executives.
• Proven track record in a quota-carrying or revenue-aligned environment with understanding of SaaS metrics and enterprise sales cycles.
• Depth in at least four technical areas: Internet fundamentals (OSI Model, BGP, DNS, HTTP/S, SSL/TLS), Security (WAF, Bot Management, Zero Trust, SASE), Performance (caching, video streaming, HTTP/2, TLS 1.3), AI Proficiency (prompt engineering, LLM utilization), Coding/Scripting (Python, JavaScript, Bash, Lua, Go), Developer Platform Fluency (RESTful/GraphQL APIs, SDKs, webhooks, Terraform, CI/CD).

• Track record of creating technical enablement (workshops, code samples, documentation).
• Experience with LLM orchestration, RAG architectures, and model-access controls.
• Understanding of regulatory requirements such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, and SOC 2.
• Background from hyperscalers, digital natives, or distributed systems environments.

Estimated annual salary of $214,000.00 - $336,000.00 for Bay Area based hires, plus variable compensation and eligibility to participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan. Benefits include medical/Rx, dental, vision insurance, flexible spending accounts, commuter spending accounts, fertility and family forming benefits, mental health support, employee assistance program, short and long term disability, life and accident insurance, 401(k) retirement savings plan, employee stock participation plan, flexible paid time off, and leave programs including parental, pregnancy health, medical, and bereavement leave.

This role may require travel up to 20–50% to attend customer meetings, conferences, and in-person team collaboration. Applicants who progress to the offer stage may be asked to attend an in-person interview within one of the Cloudflare Offices or Hubs. This position may require access to information protected under U.S. export control laws.