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Cloudflare is seeking a Presales Customer Engineer to serve as a core driver of the technical go-to-market strategy. You will act as a trusted technical advisor and primary architect of the customer journey, bridging the gap between technical strategy and business value for enterprise clients.
You will guide customers from initial pre-sales technical validation through onboarding, deployment architecture, and full lifecycle expansion. Reporting to a Customer Engineering Leader within the GTM organization, you will operate as a quota-carrying technologist, leveraging AI-augmented workflows to eliminate administrative toil and focus on high-value architectural design and measurable business outcomes.
Key responsibilities include:
**Technical Validation**: Partner with Account Executives to lead technical deep-dive discovery, capture business requirements, and map complex customer infrastructure (DNS, CDN, Zero Trust, Network Security, Workers) to fit-for-purpose Cloudflare architectures. Define scope, success criteria, and technical evaluation plans for Proof of Concepts and Technical Validations. Deliver tailored technical presentations, architectural diagrams, and demonstrations addressing performance, security, and reliability challenges. Proactively address complex technical objections, security compliance questions, and edge-case architectural requirements. Take accountability for suitable solution deployment strategy as an integral part of all proposals.
**Customer Adoption & Value Realization**: Provide oversight to technical onboarding and implementation (not execute implementation), serving as the primary executive and engineering contact. Design structured migration and onboarding blueprints tailored to customer environments (DNS migrations, Zero Trust rollouts, WAF tuning). Partner with Account Executives to own discovery, demos, onboarding, technical health, risk, and expansion strategy. Proactively monitor customer health scores and telemetry to ensure rapid time-to-value and reduce deployment risk.
**Commercial Accountability & Expansion**: Carry variable quota tied to new business acquisition and account growth. Be commercially accountable for deep platform adoption, revenue retention, and identifying strategic cross-sell and up-sell opportunities based on product usage data. Lead technical Quarterly Business Reviews to translate platform capabilities into ROI for C-level executives.
**Trusted Advisory**: Act as a trusted technical advisor throughout the entire customer lifecycle, maintaining continuous deep relationships with key stakeholders from onboarding through maturity, renewal, and expansion. Provide thought partnership on architecture, AI control layers, security posture, and deployment confidence. Identify potential deployment risks early and provide remediation strategies.
**AI Orchestration & Workflow Automation**: Leverage AI agents, Large Language Models, and internal platforms to automate routine tasks such as RFP/Security Questionnaire responses, sandbox provisioning, basic telemetry monitoring, and documentation, reclaiming time for strategic customer advisory.
**Education & Enablement**: Partner with the Enablement Team to design, build, and govern technical resources. Define, document, and educate internal teams and customers on deliverables such as Standard Operating Procedures, architectural best practices, and technical guides.
Travel up to 20–50% is required for customer meetings, conferences, industry events, and in-person team collaboration.
**Requirements**
- Experience in a customer-facing technical role such as Solutions Engineering, Customer Engineering, Professional Services, Sales Engineering, Technical Account Management, or as a Forward Deployed Engineer (years of experience will vary based on Associate, Senior, Staff, or Principal leveling).
- Architectural mindset: ability to white-board, design, and articulate complex enterprise network and security architectures clearly.
- Consultative & advisory skills: excellent communication skills with ability to translate deeply technical concepts into business outcomes for both hands-on engineers and C-level executives.
- Commercial mindset: proven track record of operating in a quota-carrying or revenue-aligned environment, with strong understanding of SaaS metrics, business value translation, and enterprise sales cycles.
- Exceptional presentation and stakeholder management skills, capable of bridging deep technical implementation details and high-level C-suite business strategy.
- Technical breadth: depth in at least four of the following technical areas:
- Internet fundamentals: deep understanding of OSI Model layers 1–7, BGP, GRE, TCP/UDP, DNS (authoritative and recursive), HTTP(S), and SSL/TLS.
- Security: expertise in WAF, Bot Management, Firewalls, Rate Limiting, (M)TLS, Zero Trust, and SASE concepts.
- Performance: expertise in speed, latency, caching, video streaming, HTTP/2, and TLS 1.3.
- AI Proficiency: familiarity with prompt engineering, AI-assisted scripting and log analysis, LLM utilization, and workflow automation.
- Coding/Scripting: proficiency in Python, JavaScript, Bash, Lua, Go, or similar languages for custom integration scripts, API connectors, and edge computing functions.
- Developer Platform Fluency: experience designing, building, deploying or scaling applications using RESTful/GraphQL APIs, SDKs, webhooks, and developer tooling in cloud-native environments. Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi), CI/CD pipelines, and observability.
- Undergraduate or graduate degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
**Strongly Preferred Qualifications**
- Track record of creating and delivering technical enablement (workshops, code samples, documentation, developer onboarding) that accelerates customer adoption of complex platforms.
- Experience with LLM orchestration, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures, and model-access controls.
- Understanding of regulatory requirements such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, and SOC 2.
- Background from hyperscalers, digital natives, distributed systems environments, or startups, valued for deeper cloud fluency and advanced architecture depth.
