Senior Forward Deployed Engineer (DevOps)
Cloudflare · San Francisco, United States · 7h 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
Hybrid | Austin, San Francisco
About the Role
Cloudflare's Senior Forward Deployed Infrastructure Engineers work where Cloudflare's infrastructure meets customer impact.
As a Forward Deployed Infrastructure Engineer, you will be embedded with one of Cloudflare's most strategic customers, collaborating to ensure modern cloud compute capacity is available, reliable, and ready when needed. You will guide new capacity from delivery to production, partnering with Cloudflare's data center and hardware teams to ensure systems pass validation, come online smoothly, and uphold Cloudflare's high standards.
You will serve as a bridge connecting Cloudflare's infrastructure, hardware, and data center teams with the customer's engineering organization. You'll ensure teams work from a shared vision, clear operational roadblocks, and feed real-world insights back into how Cloudflare builds and evolves its platform.
This role is ideal for engineers who want to:
- Stay deeply technical and hands-on with real production infrastructure.
- Guide outcomes from hardware delivery through running workloads.
- Shape how Cloudflare delivers compute capacity at scale.
- Build long-term, trust-based partnerships with world-class engineering teams.
Responsibilities
- Capacity Onboarding & Delivery: Lead bringing new compute capacity online for the customer, collaborating on planning, provisioning, validation, and handover to production. Drive turn-ups that are predictable, efficient, and repeatable.
- Hardware & Spec Validation: Partner with teams to ensure delivered systems meet agreed specifications. Define acceptance criteria and validation workflows, including burn-in, benchmarking, and health checks across compute, storage, and networking. Work alongside on-site data center teams to execute checks and resolve issues.
- Standards & Operational Readiness: Champion Cloudflare's build, configuration, security, and observability standards prior to capacity launch. Ensure comprehensive monitoring, alerting, and runbooks are established for all production systems.
- Cross-Team Alignment: Act as the central point of collaboration between Cloudflare's infrastructure, hardware engineering, data center operations, supply chain, and network teams, alongside the customer's engineering group.
- Technical Accountability: Serve as the primary technical point of contact for the customer's infrastructure, guiding account strategy and technical direction for supporting Cloudflare resources.
- Reliability & Incident Response: Engage in operational rhythms with the customer and Cloudflare, including standups, capacity reviews, change management, and incident response. Facilitate blameless root-cause analysis and post-incident improvements
. - Automation & Tooling: Develop production-quality automation and tooling for provisioning, validation, and fleet management to continually improve rollout efficiency.
- Capacity Planning & Forecasting: Partner with the customer to understand future demand, forecast capacity needs, and proactively identify constraints.
- Feedback Loop & Product Influence: Surface real-world operational issues and platform opportunities with Cloudflare's Infrastructure, Hardware, and Product teams to inform future roadmaps.
- Strategic Relationship Management: Cultivate trusted technical relationships with senior stakeholders (Staff+ engineers, Directors, and VPs) across both organizations.
- On-Site Presence: Spend time regularly on-site at customer offices to foster close communication and partnership with their engineering teams.
Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience
At Cloudflare, we know that great candidates come from diverse backgrounds with non-linear paths. You don’t need to tick every single box to be right for this role. If you are excited about building a better Internet and ready to make an impact, please apply.
- Infrastructure & SRE Background: Solid experience in infrastructure engineering, SRE, or production engineering, with a track record of running and scaling large-scale production systems.
- Capacity & Fleet Operations: Practical experience bringing server capacity online, encompassing provisioning, imaging, configuration management, and fleet-scale lifecycle management.
- Hardware Fluency: Familiarity with server hardware, firmware, BMC/IPMI/Redfish, and diagnostics. Ability to set validation standards, triage issues remotely, and partner with on-site technicians. Experience with GPUs or specialized accelerators is a plus.
- Linux & Networking: Strong understanding of Linux systems and core networking principles (TCP/IP, BGP, DNS, load balancing, and data center topologies).
- Automation & Development: Proficiency in languages such as Go, Python, or Rust, along with experience using infrastructure-as-code and configuration management tools (e.g., Terraform, Ansible, Salt).
- Production Ownership: Experience supporting mission-critical services, including on-call rotations, incident response, SLO management, and reliability engineering.
- Observability: Familiarity with monitoring, metrics, and logging frameworks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ClickHouse) to maintain system health proactively.
- Containers & Orchestration: Exposure to Kubernetes or similar platforms and workload scheduling on newly provisioned capacity.
- AI-Augmented Workflows: Interest or experience in leveraging modern AI tools to streamline automation, debugging, and documentation.
- Program-Level Coordination: Demonstrated ability to coordinate complex, multi-team delivery efforts across regions and time zones with clear communication and alignment.
- Proactive Problem-Solving: A self-motivated approach to identifying bottlenecks—whether technical or procedural—and collaborating with partners to implement durable fixes.
- Stakeholder Communication: Ability to engage comfortably in strategic technical discussions with executive-level stakeholders, translating infrastructure context into business outcomes.
Bonus Points
- Prior experience at a hyperscaler, cloud provider, or large-scale data center environment.
- Familiarity with Cloudflare's platform and network architecture.
- Experience in customer-embedded or partner-facing technical infrastructure roles.
- A history of sharing knowledge, such as technical writing, internal mentorship, open-source contributions, or community presentations.
Compensation
Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.
- For Bay Area based hires: Estimated annual salary of $194,000 - $266,000.
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.
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