Cloudflare - Senior Forward Deployed Infrastructure Engineer
Requirements
• 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.
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. • Capacity Onboarding & Delivery: • 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. • Hardware & Spec Validation: • 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. • Standards & Operational Readiness: • 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. • Cross-Team Alignment: • 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. • Technical Accountability: • 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. • Reliability & Incident Response: • Automation & Tooling: Develop production-quality automation and tooling for provisioning, validation, and fleet management to continually improve rollout efficiency. • Automation & Tooling: • Capacity Planning & Forecasting: Partner with the customer to understand future demand, forecast capacity needs, and proactively identify constraints. • Capacity Planning & Forecasting: • Feedback Loop & Product Influence: Surface real-world operational issues and platform opportunities with Cloudflare's Infrastructure, Hardware, and Product teams to inform future roadmaps. • Feedback Loop & Product Influence: • Strategic Relationship Management: Cultivate trusted technical relationships with senior stakeholders (Staff+ engineers, Directors, and VPs) across both organizations. • Strategic Relationship Management: • On-Site Presence: Spend time regularly on-site at customer offices to foster close communication and partnership with their engineering teams. • On-Site Presence: • 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. • Infrastructure & SRE Background: • Capacity & Fleet Operations: Practical experience bringing server capacity online, encompassing provisioning, imaging, configuration management, and fleet-scale lifecycle management. • Capacity & Fleet Operations: • 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. • Hardware Fluency: • Linux & Networking: Strong understanding of Linux systems and core networking principles (TCP/IP, BGP, DNS, load balancing, and data center topologies). • Linux & Networking: • 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). • Automation & Development: • Production Ownership: Experience supporting mission-critical services, including on-call rotations, incident response, SLO management, and reliability engineering. • Production Ownership: • Observability: Familiarity with monitoring, metrics, and logging frameworks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ClickHouse) to maintain system health proactively. • Observability: • Containers & Orchestration: Exposure to Kubernetes or similar platforms and workload scheduling on newly provisioned capacity. • Containers & Orchestration: • AI-Augmented Workflows: Interest or experience in leveraging modern AI tools to streamline automation, debugging, and documentation. • AI-Augmented Workflows: • Program-Level Coordination: Demonstrated ability to coordinate complex, multi-team delivery efforts across regions and time zones with clear communication and alignment. • Program-Level Coordination: • Proactive Problem-Solving: A self-motivated approach to identifying bottlenecks—whether technical or procedural—and collaborating with partners to implement durable fixes. • Proactive Problem-Solving: • Stakeholder Communication: Ability to engage comfortably in strategic technical discussions with executive-level stakeholders, translating infrastructure context into business outcomes. • Stakeholder Communication:
Benefits
• 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. • 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. • 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 • 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. • Project Galileo • 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. • Athenian Project • 1.1.1.1 • 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.
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