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Cloudflare is seeking a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer to serve as a hands-on technical build partner for a portfolio of strategic customers building on the Cloudflare developer platform. In this role, you will work shoulder-to-shoulder with customer engineering teams to shape architecture, prototype solutions, review code, and unblock hard technical problems that stand between them and production.
You will operate as a technical force multiplier across multiple customers in parallel, bringing patterns, reference implementations, and lessons learned from your portfolio to every engagement. Rather than embedding full-time with a single account, you'll drive each engagement from idea to launch while supporting the full breadth of the Cloudflare platform—from Workers and storage (KV, R2, D1) to AI services (Workers AI, AI Gateway, Vectorize), security, networking, and observability.
Key responsibilities include: designing scalable, resilient architectures and guiding critical design decisions; hands-on development alongside customer teams to prototype and build reference implementations; reviewing customer code and sharing best practices to raise quality, performance, and security; diagnosing and resolving complex technical problems across the stack; writing reference code and technical guidance; participating in customer engineering rituals such as design reviews and planning sessions; surfacing real-world product gaps and friction to Cloudflare's Product and Engineering teams; establishing trusted technical relationships with customer engineers and technical leaders; and identifying opportunities to accelerate adoption of Cloudflare services.
Requirements:
- 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, including time in a customer-facing engineering role (forward deployed, solutions engineering, sales engineering, professional services, or developer relations) where you worked hands-on with external engineering teams
- Proven track record of delivering production-grade systems, not just advising on them
- Proficiency with modern languages such as TypeScript, Rust, and Go
- "Ship-first" mentality with high velocity; staying current with modern frameworks, languages, and deployment patterns
- Broad technical fluency across the entire stack—frontend performance, backend logic, data/storage, and distributed infrastructure
- Experience owning mission-critical services with real-world users; understanding of production rigor, incident response, and architectural discipline for highly available systems
- Experience integrating AI-augmented workflows (e.g., Windsurf, OpenCode) into daily development
- Ability to decompose complex business requirements into scalable, resilient technical architectures
- Deep experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including serverless, networking, and security primitives
- Self-starter mentality; thrives in "zero-to-one" environments and owns solutions end-to-end
- Comfortable engaging in high-stakes technical and strategic discussions with VP-level stakeholders; ability to translate complex engineering trade-offs into business impact
Bonus: Direct experience building on Cloudflare Workers or the broader Cloudflare Developer Platform; visible public profile including open-source contributions, technical blogging, or speaking at industry conferences.
