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Salary: EUR 148,000 - 204,000 / annual
Cloudflare is seeking a Principal Customer Engineer to serve as a core driver of the technical go-to-market strategy for major enterprise accounts. You will act as a trusted technical advisor and primary architect of the customer journey, bridging technical strategy and business value from pre-sales validation through onboarding, deployment, and lifecycle expansion.
As a quota-carrying technologist within the GTM organization, you will operate across the entire customer lifecycle without handoff. You will leverage 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 the customer's environment. Act as lead consultant for customer engineering teams. 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. 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 to translate platform capabilities into ROI for C-level executives.
**Trusted Advisory:** Maintain continuous, deep relationships with key stakeholders throughout the customer lifecycle. Provide thought partnership on architecture, AI control layers, security posture, and deployment confidence. Identify potential risks early and provide remediation strategies.
**AI Orchestration & Workflow Automation:** Leverage AI agents, LLMs, and internal platforms to automate routine tasks such as RFP/Security Questionnaire responses, sandbox provisioning, telemetry monitoring, and documentation.
**Education & Enablement:** Partner with the Enablement Team to design and govern technical resources. Define and document SOPs, architectural best practices, and technical guides.
Travel up to 20–50% required for customer meetings, conferences, and team collaboration.
**Requirements:**
- Experience in customer-facing technical roles such as Solutions Engineering, Customer Engineering, Professional Services, Sales Engineering, Technical Account Management, or Forward Deployed Engineer (years vary by seniority level)
- Ability to white-board, design, and articulate complex enterprise network and security architectures
- Excellent communication skills translating technical concepts into business outcomes for engineers and C-level executives
- Proven track record in quota-carrying or revenue-aligned environments with understanding of SaaS metrics and enterprise sales cycles
- Exceptional presentation and stakeholder management skills
- Technical depth in at least four of the following areas: Internet fundamentals (OSI Model, BGP, GRE, TCP/UDP, DNS, HTTP(S), SSL/TLS); Security (WAF, Bot Management, Firewalls, Rate Limiting, mTLS, Zero Trust, SASE); Performance (speed, latency, caching, video streaming, HTTP/2, TLS 1.3); AI Proficiency (prompt engineering, AI-assisted scripting, LLM utilization, workflow automation); Coding/Scripting (Python, JavaScript, Bash, Lua, Go); Developer Platform Fluency (RESTful/GraphQL APIs, SDKs, webhooks, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD pipelines, observability)
- Business fluency in German
**Bonus Points:**
- Track record of creating technical enablement (workshops, code samples, documentation, developer onboarding)
- Experience with LLM orchestration, Retrieval-Augmented Generation architectures, and model-access controls
- Understanding of regulatory requirements (PCI DSS, HIPAA, SOC 2)
- Background from hyperscalers, digital natives, distributed systems environments, or startups
