Senior Customer Engineer, SLED South West (Southern California or Arizona)
Cloudflare · San Francisco, United States · 1mo ago
About Us
At Cloudflare, we are on a mission to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world’s largest networks that powers millions of websites and other Internet properties for customers ranging from individual bloggers to SMBs to Fortune 500 companies. Cloudflare protects and accelerates any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. Internet properties powered by Cloudflare all have web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with every request. As a result, they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. Cloudflare was named to Entrepreneur Magazine’s Top Company Cultures list and ranked among the World’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company.
At Cloudflare, we’re not looking for people who wait for a polished roadmap; we’re looking for the builders who see the cracks in the Internet that everyone else has simply learned to live with. We value candidates who have the instinct to spot a "normalized" problem and the AI-native curiosity to create a solution using the latest tools. Our culture is built on iteration, leveraging AI to ship faster today to make it better tomorrow, while ensuring that every improvement, no matter how small, is shared across the team to lift everyone up. If you’re the type of person who values curiosity over bureaucracy, and that AI is a partner in solving tough problems to keep the Internet moving forward, you’ll fit right in.
Available Locations: Southern California or Arizona
*This is a work-from-home 100% remote role, but you should reside in one of the regions."
What you’ll do as a Senior Customer Engineer SLED
About the Role
At Cloudflare, we are on a mission to help build a better Internet. As the architectural complexity of enterprise solutions scales, we are evolving how we partner with our customers. The Customer Engineer (CE) represents the core driver of our technical go-to-market strategy: a trusted advisor who owns the technical relationship from the initial discovery phase through to long-term adoption and ongoing account expansion.
Sitting within the GTM organization and reporting to the Regional Customer Engineering Leader, this specialized role will focus heavily on our SLED (State, Local, and Education) and Local Government sectors. You will not hand off your customers once an initial agreement is reached. Instead, you will operate as a quota-carrying technologist, utilizing AI-augmented workflows to eliminate administrative toil so you can focus on high-value architectural design and driving measurable business outcomes across the entire public sector customer journey.
Key Responsibilities
- Technical Validation: Partner closely with Account Executives to lead technical discovery, build bespoke architectures, and deliver compelling product demonstrations and Proof of Concepts (PoCs) across Cloudflare’s portfolio (Security, Networking, and Developer Platforms) tailored to public sector procurement and compliance standards.
- Customer Adoption & Value Realization: Lead and/or provide oversight to technical onboarding and implementation, serving as the primary executive and engineering contact for the customer. You will partner with Account Executives to own discovery, demos, onboarding, technical health, risk, and expansion strategy. You will proactively monitor dynamic customer health scores and telemetry to ensure rapid time-to-value and resolve integration bottlenecks common in municipal and educational IT infrastructures.
- Commercial Accountability & Expansion: Carry a variable quota tied directly to new business acquisition and/or ongoing account growth. You will be commercially accountable for ensuring deep platform adoption, retaining revenue, and identifying strategic cross-sell and up-sell opportunities based on product usage data. Lead technical Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) to translate platform capabilities into return on investment for C-level executives.
- Trusted Advisory: Act as a trusted technical advisor throughout the entire customer lifecycle, maintaining a continuous, deep relationship with key stakeholders from initial onboarding through maturity, renewal, and expansion.
- AI Orchestration & Workflow Automation: Act as an "AI-Augmented" engineer. Leverage AI agents and internal platforms to automate routine tasks such as RFP/Security Questionnaire responses, sandbox provisioning, and basic telemetry monitoring, reclaiming your time for strategic customer advisory.
Minimum Qualifications
- Public Sector Expertise: Proven experience working with or selling into SLED, Local Government, or Municipal agencies, with a deep understanding of public sector buying cycles, compliance requirements, and unique government IT constraints.
- Experience: Experience in a customer-facing technical role, such as Solutions Engineering, Customer Engineering, Sales Engineering, or as a Forward Deployed Engineer (years of experience required will vary based on Associate, Senior, Staff, or Principal leveling).
- Technical Acumen: Broad technical expertise spanning web security, networking (routing, DNS, DDoS mitigation), cloud infrastructure, and enterprise architecture.
- Commercial Mindset: Proven track record of operating in a quota-carrying or revenue-aligned environment, with a strong understanding of SaaS metrics, business value translation, and public sector/enterprise sales cycles.
- Communication: Exceptional presentation and stakeholder management skills, capable of bridging the gap between deep technical implementation details and high-level government C-suite/elected official business strategy.
Strongly Preferred Qualifications (The "Good-to-Haves")
- Cloudflare AI Stack Experience: Hands-on experience building, deploying, or architecting solutions using Cloudflare's developer platform and AI ecosystem, specifically Workers AI, AI Gateway, and Vectorize.
- Applied AI Knowledge: Experience with prompt engineering, Large Language Model (LLM) orchestration, or Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures.
- Coding/Scripting: Proficiency in Python, JavaScript, or similar languages to write custom integration scripts, API connectors, and edge computing functions.
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Compensation
Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.
- For San Francisco based hires: Estimated annual salary of $231,000-$275,000+ OTE, Base + Commissions
- Los Angeles based hires: Estimated annual salary of $221,000 - $267,000 OTE, Base + Commissions.
Equity
This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan.
Benefits
Cloudflare offers a complete package of benefits and programs to support you and your family. Our benefits programs can help you pay health care expenses, support caregiving, build capital for the future and make life a little easier and fun! The below is a description of our benefits for employees in the United States, and benefits may vary for employees based outside the U.S.
Health & Welfare Benefits
- Medical/Rx Insurance
- Dental Insurance
- Vision Insurance
- Flexible Spending Accounts
- Commuter Spending Accounts
- Fertility & Family Forming Benefits
- On-demand mental health support and Employee Assistance Program
- Global Travel Medical Insurance
Financial Benefits
- Short and Long Term Disability Insurance
- Life & Accident Insurance
- 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan
- Employee Stock Participation Plan
Time Off
- Flexible paid time off covering vacation and sick leave
- Leave programs, including parental, pregnancy health, medical, and bereavement leave
What Makes Cloudflare Special?
We’re not just a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company. We’re a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company with a soul. Fundamental to our mission to help build a better Internet is protecting the free and open Internet.
Project Galileo: Since 2014, we've equipped more than 2,400 journalism and civil society organizations in 111 countries with powerful tools to defend themselves against attacks that would otherwise censor their work, technology already used by Cloudflare’s enterprise customers--at no cost.
Athenian Project: In 2017, we created the Athenian Project to ensure that state and local governments have the highest level of protection and reliability for free, so that their constituents have access to election information and voter registration. Since the project, we've provided services to more than 425 local government election websites in 33 states.
1.1.1.1: We released 1.1.1.1 to help fix the foundation of the Internet by building a faster, more secure and privacy-centric public DNS resolver. This is available publicly for everyone to use - it is the first consumer-focused service Cloudflare has ever released. Here’s the deal - we don’t store client IP addresses never, ever. We will continue to abide by our privacy commitment and ensure that no user data is sold to advertisers or used to target consumers.
Sound like something you’d like to be a part of? We’d love to hear from you!
Please note that applicants who progress to the offer stage of the interview process may be asked to attend an in-person interview within one of the Cloudflare Offices or Cloudflare Hubs. More details about this will be available at that stage of the interview process.
This position may require access to information protected under U.S. export control laws, including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations. Please note that any offer of employment may be conditioned on your authorization to receive software or technology controlled under these U.S. export laws without sponsorship for an export license.
Cloudflare is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunity for all people and place great value in both diversity and inclusiveness. All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to their, or any other person's, perceived or actual race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, family care status, or any other basis protected by law. We are an AA/Veterans/Disabled Employer.
Cloudflare provides reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities. Please tell us if you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job. Examples of reasonable accommodations include, but are not limited to, changing the application process, providing documents in an alternate format, using a sign language interpreter, or using specialized equipment. If you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job, please contact us via e-mail at hr@cloudflare.com or via mail at 101 Townsend St. San Francisco, CA 94107.