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Cloudflare is seeking an experienced Engineering Manager for Data Center Operations to build and lead a distributed team managing the company's expanding data center footprint across the United States. You will own the full lifecycle of new data center sites: greenfield builds through third-party vendors and colocation partners, production operations, and secure hardware decommissioning.
Key Responsibilities:
Team Leadership: Hire, develop, and manage Data Center Engineers stationed at multiple sites across the US. Establish clear expectations, career paths, and a culture of ownership across geographically distributed teams. Build and participate in 24x7 on-call rotations, defining coverage models and incident SLAs. Serve as the escalation point for on-site incidents, coordinating with engineers, colocation providers, and vendors to restore service and lead root-cause analysis.
Site Delivery: Own build timelines from site readiness through hardware delivery, rack-and-stack, cabling, validation, and production handoff. Run greenfield builds as multi-workstream programs, coordinating third-party integrators and contractors to meet deadlines without compromising quality. Be on-site during critical build phases to oversee vendor work and verify production readiness.
Production Operations: Be accountable for hardware availability targets. Manage break/fix, repairs, RMAs, and spares strategy. Manage colocation providers and vendors day-to-day, addressing escalations, remote-hands quality, power and cooling issues, and performance against contractual commitments.
Documentation and DCIM: Ensure every site is fully documented in DCIM from day one, including rack elevations, power, cabling, asset location, and lifecycle status. Treat infrastructure records as a source of truth for operations and dependent teams. Partner with tooling teams to bring DCIM online at new sites and define documentation standards that scale.
Decommissioning and Hardware Lifecycle: Own on-site decommissioning end-to-end, including unracking, physical collections, serial number verification, chain of custody, and handoff for secure destruction. Partner with vendor management on IT asset disposition (ITAD) vendors and ensure destruction certificates and compliance evidence are audit-ready.
Security and Compliance: Ensure sites and teams meet Cloudflare's physical security, access control, chain-of-custody, and compliance obligations. Follow established procedures and work with security and compliance teams to develop new ones as needed. Support audits with accurate, timely evidence, treating audit readiness as a continuous standard.
Automation and Operational Efficiency: Identify manual, repetitive work in build, break/fix, decommissioning, and evidence collection. Influence tooling and automation teams to eliminate it. Evaluate and adopt AI-assisted workflows for incident triage, root-cause analysis, documentation, and compliance evidence generation. Scale operations through tooling, not just headcount.
Business Reporting: Own weekly business reviews and monthly/quarterly reporting on availability, build progress, incidents, and operational health to leadership. Partner with network, systems, hardware, supply chain, and infrastructure engineering teams to ensure physical operations support what runs on top of them.
Required Experience:
- 6+ years in data center operations, including 3+ years directly managing on-site technical teams; experience leading geographically distributed teams required
- Track record operating multi-site data center fleets at hyperscale or large-cloud scale
- Hands-on experience with IT hardware (servers, network devices, optics, cabling), not just facilities infrastructure
- Hands-on depth to coach engineers and judge quality of vendor/contractor work
- Experience owning sites across full lifecycle: greenfield builds through third-party vendors, steady-state operations, and decommissioning
- Experience managing providers in Tier III+ colocation facilities and holding them accountable
- Experience managing 24x7 on-call operations and incident escalation
- Strong Layer 1 and Layer 2 fundamentals: structured cabling, fiber/optics, patching standards, switching basics, physical connectivity troubleshooting
- Solid knowledge of data center power and cooling, rack design, high-density deployments, and hardware lifecycle management
- Strong understanding of DCIM and asset management systems with track record of maintaining accurate documentation from hardware arrival through decommissioning
- Working knowledge of security and compliance frameworks common in enterprise-grade data centers
- Strong program management skills across multiple vendors, sites, and time-bound workstreams
- Track record of reducing toil through tooling or process redesign
- Excellent written and verbal communication, including business reviews and status/risk/availability reporting
- Ability to travel regularly to data center sites (more frequent during builds, periodic during steady state)
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience standing up a new data center operations function or region from zero
- Background at a hyperscaler, cloud provider, major CDN, or similarly fast-scaling infrastructure company
- Experience with ITAD vendor programs and secure destruction requirements
- Experience with PagerDuty or similar on-call and incident tooling
- Familiarity with DCIM tools (NetBox, Nlyte), Jira-based workflows, and Confluence documentation
- Experience with remote-hands programs and vendor scorecards
- Background in hardware diagnostics, burn-in, or automated build validation
