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Cloudflare is seeking a Principal Customer Engineer to serve as a trusted technical advisor and primary architect of the customer journey for enterprise clients in the Central Majors region. This is a quota-carrying technical role that bridges pre-sales technical validation through onboarding, deployment architecture, and full lifecycle expansion.
You will report to a Customer Engineering Leader and operate as the core driver of Cloudflare's technical go-to-market strategy. Unlike traditional handoff models, you will maintain ownership of customers throughout their entire lifecycle, leveraging AI-augmented workflows to eliminate administrative toil and focus on high-value architectural design and measurable business outcomes.
Key Responsibilities:
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 execution), serving as the primary executive and engineering contact. Design structured migration and onboarding blueprints tailored to customer environments. Act as lead consultant for customer engineering teams. Partner with Account Executives on 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 ongoing account growth. Ensure deep platform adoption, revenue retention, and identify strategic cross-sell and up-sell opportunities based on product usage data. Lead technical Quarterly Business Reviews translating platform capabilities into ROI for C-level executives.
Trusted Advisory: Maintain continuous, deep relationships with key stakeholders from initial 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.
Education & Enablement: Partner with the Enablement Team to design, build, and govern technical resources. Define, document, and educate internal teams and customers on Standard Operating Procedures, architectural best practices, and technical guides.
Travel: This role may require travel up to 20–50% to attend customer meetings, conferences, industry events, and in-person team collaboration.
Qualifications:
Experience: Demonstrated 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 leveling (Associate, Senior, Staff, or Principal).
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 operating in quota-carrying or revenue-aligned environments with strong understanding of SaaS metrics, business value translation, and enterprise sales cycles.
Communication: 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
Education: Undergraduate or graduate degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
Strongly Preferred: Technical enablement track record; applied AI knowledge (LLM orchestration, RAG architectures, model-access controls); regulatory knowledge (PCI DSS, HIPAA, SOC 2); hyperscaler, digital native, distributed systems, or startup background.
