Presales Customer Engineer

Cloudflare•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

The Customer Engineer is a customer-facing technical advisor and primary architect of the customer journey, bridging technical strategy and business value. The role guides enterprise clients from pre-sales technical validation through onboarding, deployment architecture, and lifecycle expansion. It sits within the go-to-market organization and reports to a Customer Engineering Leader. The Customer Engineer remains engaged after an initial agreement and carries a variable quota tied to new business and/or account growth, using AI-augmented workflows to reduce administrative work and focus on customer architecture and business outcomes. The role partners with Account Executives to discover customer needs, map infrastructure to Cloudflare solutions, plan and deliver evaluations, and address technical and compliance concerns. It oversees technical onboarding and implementation without executing the implementation, provides customer engineering teams with migration and configuration guidance, monitors technical health and deployment risks, and supports adoption, retention, and expansion. The Customer Engineer also advises stakeholders throughout the customer lifecycle, leads technical business reviews, automates routine workflows with AI tools, and develops technical enablement resources for internal teams and customers. The role is based in Sydney, Australia, and may require travel up to 20–50% for customer meetings, conferences, industry events, and in-person team collaboration.

Requirements

Experience in a customer-facing technical role such as Solutions Engineering, Customer Engineering, Professional Services, Sales Engineering, Technical Account Management, or Forward Deployed Engineering; required years of experience vary by leveling.
Ability to design and clearly explain complex enterprise network and security architectures.
Excellent communication skills, including translating technical concepts into business outcomes for engineers and C-level executives.
Proven experience in a quota-carrying or revenue-aligned environment and understanding of SaaS metrics, business value, and enterprise sales cycles.
Exceptional presentation and stakeholder-management skills.
Demonstrated depth in at least four technical areas: Internet fundamentals; Internet security; Internet performance; AI proficiency; coding or scripting; or developer platform fluency.
Undergraduate or graduate degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.

Nice To Haves

Experience creating and delivering technical enablement, such as workshops, code samples, documentation, or developer onboarding.
Experience with LLM orchestration, Retrieval-Augmented Generation architectures, and model-access controls.
Understanding of regulatory requirements such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, and SOC 2.
Experience from hyperscalers, digital-native companies, distributed systems environments, or startups.

Responsibilities

Partner with Account Executives to conduct technical discovery, capture business requirements, and map customer infrastructure to suitable Cloudflare architectures and solutions.
Define scope, success criteria, and technical evaluation plans for Proofs of Concept and Technical Validations.
Deliver tailored technical presentations, architectural diagrams, and demonstrations addressing customer performance, security, and reliability challenges.
Address technical objections, security compliance questions, and complex architectural requirements during the sales cycle.
Ensure proposals include an appropriate solution deployment strategy involving the customer, a partner, or Cloudflare Professional Services.
Oversee technical onboarding and implementation as the primary executive and engineering contact, without executing the implementation.
Design migration and onboarding blueprints and guide customer engineering teams through configuration best practices.
Partner with Account Executives on discovery, demos, onboarding, technical health, risk, and expansion strategy.
Monitor customer health scores and telemetry, promote time-to-value, resolve integration bottlenecks, and reduce deployment risk.
Carry a variable quota tied to new business acquisition and/or ongoing account growth; drive platform adoption, revenue retention, and cross-sell and upsell opportunities.
Lead technical Quarterly Business Reviews and communicate return on investment to C-level executives.
Advise customers throughout onboarding, maturity, renewal, and expansion on architecture, AI control layers, security posture, and deployment confidence.
Identify deployment risks and integration bottlenecks early and recommend remediation strategies.
Use AI agents, LLMs, and internal platforms to automate routine tasks such as RFP and security questionnaire responses, sandbox provisioning, telemetry monitoring, and documentation.
Partner with the Enablement Team to create and govern technical resources, including SOPs, architectural best practices, and technical guides, and educate internal teams and customers.