Senior Forward Deployed Infrastructure Engineer

At Cloudflare we are on a mission to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the worlds largest networks that powers millions of websites and other Internet properties for customers ranging from individual bloggers to SMBs to Fortune 500 companies. Cloudflare protects and accelerates any Internet application online without adding hardware installing software or changing a line of code. Internet properties powered by Cloudflare all have web traffic routed through its intelligent global network which gets smarter with every request. As a result they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. Cloudflare was named to Entrepreneur Magazines Top Company Cultures list and ranked among the Worlds Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company.

At Cloudflare were not looking for people who wait for a polished roadmap; were looking for the builders who see the cracks in the Internet that everyone else has simply learned to live with. We value candidates who have the instinct to spot a normalized problem and the AI-native curiosity to create a solution using the latest tools. Our culture is built on iteration leveraging AI to ship faster today to make it better tomorrow while ensuring that every improvement no matter how small is shared across the team to lift everyone up. If youre the type of person who values curiosity over bureaucracy and that AI is a partner in solving tough problems to keep the Internet moving forward youll fit right in.

Hybrid Austin San Francisco

Cloudflares Senior Forward Deployed Infrastructure Engineers work where Cloudflares infrastructure meets customer impact.

As a Forward Deployed Infrastructure Engineer you will be embedded with one of Cloudflares most strategic customers collaborating to ensure modern cloud compute capacity is available reliable and ready when needed. You will guide new capacity from delivery to production partnering with Cloudflares data center and hardware teams to ensure systems pass validation come online smoothly and uphold Cloudflares high standards.

You will serve as a bridge connecting Cloudflares infrastructure hardware and data center teams with the customers engineering organization. Youll ensure teams work from a shared vision clear operational roadblocks and feed real-world insights back into how Cloudflare builds and evolves its platform.

This role is ideal for engineers who want to:

• Stay deeply technical and hands-on with real production infrastructure.
• Guide outcomes from hardware delivery through running workloads.
• Shape how Cloudflare delivers compute capacity at scale.
• Build long-term trust-based partnerships with world-class engineering teams.

• Capacity Onboarding & Delivery: Lead bringing new compute capacity online for the customer collaborating on planning provisioning validation and handover to production. Drive turn-ups that are predictable efficient and repeatable.
  
  
• Hardware & Spec Validation: Partner with teams to ensure delivered systems meet agreed specifications. Define acceptance criteria and validation workflows including burn-in benchmarking and health checks across compute storage and networking. Work alongside on-site data center teams to execute checks and resolve issues.
  
  
• Standards & Operational Readiness: Champion Cloudflares build configuration security and observability standards prior to capacity launch. Ensure comprehensive monitoring alerting and runbooks are established for all production systems.
  
  
• Cross-Team Alignment: Act as the central point of collaboration between Cloudflares infrastructure hardware engineering data center operations supply chain and network teams alongside the customers engineering group.
  
  
• Technical Accountability: Serve as the primary technical point of contact for the customers infrastructure guiding account strategy and technical direction for supporting Cloudflare resources.
  
  
• Reliability & Incident Response: Engage in operational rhythms with the customer and Cloudflare including standups capacity reviews change management and incident response. Facilitate blameless root-cause analysis and post-incident improvements
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• Automation & Tooling: Develop production-quality automation and tooling for provisioning validation and fleet management to continually improve rollout efficiency.
  
  
• Capacity Planning & Forecasting: Partner with the customer to understand future demand forecast capacity needs and proactively identify constraints.
  
  
• Feedback Loop & Product Influence: Surface real-world operational issues and platform opportunities with Cloudflares Infrastructure Hardware and Product teams to inform future roadmaps.
  
  
• Strategic Relationship Management: Cultivate trusted technical relationships with senior stakeholders (Staff engineers Directors and VPs) across both organizations.
  
  
• On-Site Presence: Spend time regularly on-site at customer offices to foster close communication and partnership with their engineering teams.

At Cloudflare we know that great candidates come from diverse backgrounds with non-linear paths. You dont need to tick every single box to be right for this role. If you are excited about building a better Internet and ready to make an impact please apply.

• Infrastructure & SRE Background: Solid experience in infrastructure engineering SRE or production engineering with a track record of running and scaling large-scale production systems.
• Capacity & Fleet Operations: Practical experience bringing server capacity online encompassing provisioning imaging configuration management and fleet-scale lifecycle management.
• Hardware Fluency: Familiarity with server hardware firmware BMC/IPMI/Redfish and diagnostics. Ability to set validation standards triage issues remotely and partner with on-site technicians. Experience with GPUs or specialized accelerators is a plus.
• Linux & Networking: Strong understanding of Linux systems and core networking principles (TCP/IP BGP DNS load balancing and data center topologies).
• Automation & Development: Proficiency in languages such as Go Python or Rust along with experience using infrastructure-as-code and configuration management tools (e.g. Terraform Ansible Salt).
• Production Ownership: Experience supporting mission-critical services including on-call rotations incident response SLO management and reliability engineering.
• Observability: Familiarity with monitoring metrics and logging frameworks (e.g. Prometheus Grafana ClickHouse) to maintain system health proactively.
• Containers & Orchestration: Exposure to Kubernetes or similar platforms and workload scheduling on newly provisioned capacity.
• AI-Augmented Workflows: Interest or experience in leveraging modern AI tools to streamline automation debugging and documentation.
• Program-Level Coordination: Demonstrated ability to coordinate complex multi-team delivery efforts across regions and time zones with clear communication and alignment.
• Proactive Problem-Solving: A self-motivated approach to identifying bottleneckswhether technical or proceduraland collaborating with partners to implement durable fixes.
• Stakeholder Communication: Ability to engage comfortably in strategic technical discussions with executive-level stakeholders translating infrastructure context into business outcomes.

• Prior experience at a hyperscaler cloud provider or large-scale data center environment.
• Familiarity with Cloudflares platform and network architecture.
• Experience in customer-embedded or partner-facing technical infrastructure roles.
• A history of sharing knowledge such as technical writing internal mentorship open-source contributions or community presentations.

Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.

• For Bay Area based hires: Estimated annual salary of $194000 - $266000.

This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflares equity plan.

Cloudflare offers a complete package of benefits and programs to support you and your family. Our benefits programs can help you pay health care expenses support caregiving build capital for the future and make life a little easier and fun! The below is a description of our benefits for employees in the United States and benefits may vary for employees based outside the U.S.

• Medical/Rx Insurance
• Dental Insurance
• Vision Insurance
• Flexible Spending Accounts
• Commuter Spending Accounts
• Fertility & Family Forming Benefits
• On-demand mental health support and Employee Assistance Program
• Global Travel Medical Insurance

• Short and Long Term Disability Insurance
• Life & Accident Insurance
• 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan
• Employee Stock Participation Plan

• Flexible paid time off covering vacation and sick leave
• Leave programs including parental pregnancy health medical and bereavement leave

Were not just a highly ambitious large-scale technology company. Were a highly ambitious large-scale technology company with a soul. Fundamental to our mission to help build a better Internet is protecting the free and open Internet.

Project Galileo: Since 2014 weve equipped more than 2400 journalism and civil society organizations in 111 countries with powerful tools to defend themselves against attacks that would otherwise censor their work technology already used by Cloudflares enterprise customers--at no cost.

Athenian Project: In 2017 we created the Athenian Project to ensure that state and local governments have the highest level of protection and reliability for free so that their constituents have access to election information and voter registration. Since the project weve provided services to more than 425 local government election websites in 33 states.

1.1.1.1: We released 1.1.1.1 to help fix the foundation of the Internet by building a faster more secure and privacy-centric public DNS resolver. This is available publicly for everyone to use - it is the first consumer-focused service Cloudflare has ever released. Heres the deal - we dont store client IP addresses never ever. We will continue to abide by our privacy commitment and ensure that no user data is sold to advertisers or used to target consumers.

Sound like something youd like to be a part of Wed love to hear from you!

Please note that applicants who progress to the offer stage of the interview process may be asked to attend an in-person interview within one of the Cloudflare Offices or Cloudflare Hubs. More details about this will be available at that stage of the interview process.

This position may require access to information protected under U.S. export control laws including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations. Please note that any offer of employment may be conditioned on your authorization to receive software or technology controlled under these U.S. export laws without sponsorship for an export license.

Cloudflare is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunity for all people and place great value in both diversity and inclusiveness. All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to their or any other persons perceived or actual race color religion sex gender gender identity gender expression sexual orientation national origin ancestry citizenship age physical or mental disability medical condition family care status or any other basis protected by law. We are an AA/Veterans/Disabled Employer.

Cloudflare provides reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities. Please tell us if you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job. Examples of reasonable accommodations include but are not limited to changing the application process providing documents in an alternate format using a sign language interpreter or using specialized equipment. If you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job please contact us via e-mail at or via mail at 101 Townsend St. San Francisco CA 94107.