Senior Forward Deployed Engineer (DevOps)

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

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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.

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