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Salary: USD 194,000 - 266,000 / annual
Cloudflare is seeking a Senior Forward Deployed Infrastructure Engineer to work embedded with strategic customers, serving as a bridge between Cloudflare's infrastructure, hardware, and data center teams and the customer's engineering organization.
In this role, you will be responsible for guiding new compute capacity from delivery through production, ensuring systems are validated, come online smoothly, and meet Cloudflare's high standards. You'll lead capacity onboarding efforts, partner on hardware specification validation, champion operational readiness standards, and act as the primary technical point of contact for the customer's infrastructure strategy.
Key responsibilities include:
- Leading capacity onboarding and delivery, collaborating on planning, provisioning, validation, and handover to production
- Partnering with teams to ensure delivered systems meet agreed specifications, defining acceptance criteria and validation workflows
- Championing Cloudflare's build, configuration, security, and observability standards prior to capacity launch
- Acting as the central point of collaboration between Cloudflare's infrastructure, hardware, data center, supply chain, and network teams alongside the customer's engineering group
- Serving as the primary technical point of contact for the customer's infrastructure, guiding account strategy and technical direction
- Engaging in operational rhythms including standups, capacity reviews, change management, and incident response
- Developing production-quality automation and tooling for provisioning, validation, and fleet management
- Partnering with customers to understand future demand, forecast capacity needs, and identify constraints
- Surfacing real-world operational issues and platform opportunities to inform Cloudflare's roadmaps
- Cultivating trusted technical relationships with senior stakeholders across both organizations
- Spending regular time on-site at customer offices to foster close communication and partnership
This role is ideal for engineers who want to stay deeply technical and hands-on with real production infrastructure while guiding outcomes from hardware delivery through running workloads, shaping how Cloudflare delivers compute capacity at scale, and building long-term partnerships with world-class engineering teams.
REQUIREMENTS:
Desirable skills and experience include:
- Solid experience in infrastructure engineering, SRE, or production engineering with a track record of running and scaling large-scale production systems
- Practical experience bringing server capacity online, encompassing provisioning, imaging, configuration management, and fleet-scale lifecycle management
- Familiarity with server hardware, firmware, BMC/IPMI/Redfish, and diagnostics; ability to set validation standards and triage issues remotely
- Strong understanding of Linux systems and core networking principles (TCP/IP, BGP, DNS, load balancing, data center topologies)
- Proficiency in languages such as Go, Python, or Rust, along with experience using infrastructure-as-code and configuration management tools (Terraform, Ansible, Salt)
- Experience supporting mission-critical services, including on-call rotations, incident response, SLO management, and reliability engineering
- Familiarity with monitoring, metrics, and logging frameworks (Prometheus, Grafana, ClickHouse)
- Exposure to Kubernetes or similar platforms and workload scheduling on newly provisioned capacity
- Interest or experience in leveraging modern AI tools to streamline automation, debugging, and documentation
- Demonstrated ability to coordinate complex, multi-team delivery efforts across regions and time zones
- Self-motivated approach to identifying bottlenecks and collaborating with partners to implement durable fixes
- Ability to engage in strategic technical discussions with executive-level stakeholders
Bonus experience includes prior work at a hyperscaler, cloud provider, or large-scale data center environment; familiarity with Cloudflare's platform and network architecture; experience in customer-embedded or partner-facing technical infrastructure roles; and a history of sharing knowledge through technical writing, mentorship, open-source contributions, or community presentations.
