Senior Customer Engineer, Strategic - Seattle, WA
About The Position
Cloudflare is hiring a Senior Customer Engineer to serve as a trusted technical advisor and primary architect of the customer journey, bridging technical strategy and business value for enterprise clients. The role spans pre-sales technical validation, onboarding oversight, deployment architecture, customer adoption, 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. The role involves partnering with Account Executives and customer teams to understand business and technical requirements, map complex infrastructure to Cloudflare architectures, and guide customers toward measurable performance, security, and reliability outcomes. The Customer Engineer oversees onboarding and implementation without executing the implementation directly, advises on architecture and security posture, and helps identify and reduce deployment risks. AI agents, large language models, and internal platforms are used to automate routine work and create more time for strategic customer guidance. The position is available in Seattle, Washington, and may require travel of up to 20–50%.
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 vary by level.
- Ability to whiteboard, design, and clearly articulate complex enterprise network and security architectures.
- Excellent communication skills and ability to translate technical concepts into business outcomes for engineers and C-level executives.
- Proven record in a quota-carrying or revenue-aligned environment, with understanding of SaaS metrics, business value, and enterprise sales cycles.
- Exceptional presentation and stakeholder-management skills.
- Demonstrated depth in at least four of the listed technical areas: Internet fundamentals; Internet security; Internet performance; AI proficiency; coding and 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, to accelerate customer adoption of complex platforms.
- Experience with LLM orchestration, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) 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 lead technical discovery, capture business requirements, and map customer infrastructure to fit-for-purpose Cloudflare architectures and bespoke solutions.
- Define scope, success criteria, and evaluation plans for Proofs of Concept and technical validations.
- Deliver tailored technical presentations, architectural diagrams, and demonstrations; address technical objections, security compliance questions, and edge-case requirements.
- Ensure each proposal includes an appropriate 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, including DNS migrations, Zero Trust rollouts, and WAF tuning guidance; advise customer engineering teams on configuration best practices.
- Partner with Account Executives on discovery, demos, onboarding, technical health, risk, and expansion strategy.
- Monitor customer health scores and telemetry to accelerate time-to-value, resolve integration bottlenecks, and reduce deployment risk.
- Carry variable quota tied to new business acquisition and/or account growth; drive platform adoption, revenue retention, and strategic cross-sell and upsell opportunities.
- Lead technical Quarterly Business Reviews and translate platform capabilities into return on investment for C-level executives.
- Maintain trusted relationships with customer stakeholders throughout onboarding, maturity, renewal, and expansion; advise on architecture, AI control layers, security posture, and deployment confidence.
- Identify deployment risks and integration bottlenecks early and provide 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; educate internal teams and customers.
Benefits
- Medical/Rx insurance
- Dental insurance
- Vision insurance
- Flexible Spending Accounts
- Commuter Spending Accounts
- Fertility and family-forming benefits
- On-demand mental health support and Employee Assistance Program
- Global Travel Medical Insurance
- Short- and long-term disability insurance
- Life and 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
- Equity plan participation
- Variable incentive compensation under the Sales Compensation Plan
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
