SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Cloudflare is seeking a Principal Customer Engineer to serve as a trusted technical advisor and primary architect of the customer journey for enterprise accounts in the France region. This is a quota-carrying technical role that bridges pre-sales validation through post-sale expansion, operating within the GTM organization.
Key Responsibilities:
Technical Validation: Lead technical deep-dive discovery with Account Executives to capture business requirements and map complex customer infrastructure (DNS, CDN, Zero Trust, Network Security, Workers) to Cloudflare solutions. Define scope, success criteria, and 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 (customer, partner, or Cloudflare Professional Services) as part of all proposals.
Customer Adoption & Value Realization: Provide oversight to technical onboarding and implementation (not execute implementation), serving as primary executive and engineering contact. Design structured migration and onboarding blueprints tailored to customer environments (DNS migrations, Zero Trust rollouts, WAF tuning). 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 account growth. Ensure deep platform adoption, revenue retention, and identify cross-sell/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 onboarding through maturity, renewal, and expansion. Provide thought partnership on architecture, AI control layers, security posture, and deployment confidence. Identify deployment risks early and provide remediation strategies.
AI Orchestration & Workflow Automation: Leverage AI agents, LLMs, and internal platforms to automate routine tasks (RFP/Security Questionnaire responses, sandbox provisioning, telemetry monitoring, documentation), reclaiming time for strategic advisory.
Education & Enablement: Partner with Enablement Team to design, build, and govern technical resources. Define, document, and educate internal teams and customers on SOPs, architectural best practices, and technical guides.
Travel: Up to 20–50% for customer meetings, conferences, industry events, and in-person team collaboration.
Requirements:
Experience: Background 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 level).
Architectural Mindset: Ability to white-board, design, and articulate complex enterprise network and security architectures clearly.
Consultative & Advisory Skills: Excellent communication translating deeply technical concepts into business outcomes for engineers and C-level executives.
Commercial Mindset: Proven track record 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 bridging technical implementation details and high-level C-suite strategy.
Technical Breadth: Depth in at least four of the following domains:
- Internet fundamentals (OSI Model layers 1–7, 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, or similar)
- Developer Platform Fluency (RESTful/GraphQL APIs, SDKs, webhooks, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, observability)
Education: Undergraduate or graduate degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
Strongly Preferred: Technical enablement track record; applied AI knowledge (LLM orchestration, RAG architectures); regulatory knowledge (PCI DSS, HIPAA, SOC 2); hyperscaler/digital native/distributed systems background.
