Senior Customer Reliability Engineer

Cloudflare•Austin, TX

About The Position

Cloudflare is building a customer-facing engineering organization to improve the reliability of critical systems customers run on its network. The Customer Reliability Engineer (CRE) role applies site reliability engineering practices outward, owning complex reliability issues for important customers while contributing to Cloudflare products and tooling in partnership with Product Engineering. The function combines rapid incident response with proactive reliability engineering, and is being developed as an AI-native discipline. In the rapid-response role, the engineer owns high-severity, cross-layer customer issues from first signal through confirmed resolution. This includes reproducing defects, debugging across Cloudflare infrastructure and customer systems, coordinating fixes with Product Engineering, communicating with customers, and producing useful postmortems. The position participates in a global on-call rotation for high-severity incidents, including weekends. When not responding to incidents, the engineer analyzes customer support and telemetry signals to identify systemic risks and develops monitoring, detection, diagnostics, and automation to prevent or reduce future incidents. Work may include distributed tracing, customer-impact detectors, and AI-assisted diagnostic agents that gather relevant logs and configuration and propose evidence-linked root causes. The role also defines customer-facing reliability metrics and drives measurable improvements. The engineer manages technical escalations, partners with Product Engineering and platform teams, and raises the technical capability of Customer Support through pair-debugging, knowledge transfer, shared tooling, runbooks, and documentation. The role requires current expertise across Cloudflare products and serving as a subject-matter expert in one or more technical domains. The position is available in Austin, United States.

Requirements

At least 5 years of hands-on experience in site reliability engineering, escalation engineering, systems engineering, or a comparable deeply technical support or operations role.
At least 2 years of experience in customer-facing environments.
Strong TCP/IP fundamentals, including the OSI model, IPv4/IPv6 addressing, subnetting, routing, and switching.
Knowledge of DNS, HTTP/S, TLS/SSL, SMTP, SNMP, and NTP.
Knowledge of BGP and OSPF, including path selection and route propagation.
Knowledge of firewall concepts, including stateful and stateless inspection, rule sets, NAT, and ACLs.
Knowledge of VPNs and encryption, including IPSec, SSL/TLS tunnels, and GRE; familiarity with Zero Trust architecture, network segmentation, and modern security models.
Proficiency with packet capture and analysis tools such as Wireshark and tcpdump; log aggregation such as Kibana and Elasticsearch; metrics dashboards such as Grafana; and distributed tracing.
Strong scripting and automation skills in Bash and Python, with a track record of shipping tooling that improves reliability and reduces toil.
Experience with incident management, postmortem culture, and SLO/SLI-based reliability practices.
Excellent written and verbal communication, including the ability to explain complex technical information clearly to engineers, leadership, and customers.
Ability to own ambiguous, cross-layer problems and remain composed during high-severity incidents.
SRE, DevOps, or platform engineering experience with direct customer-facing accountability.
Deep expertise at both L3/L4 network infrastructure and L7 application protocols, DNS, HTTP, and WebSocket.
Expert-level proficiency with Linux command-line tools, including curl, dig, git, traceroute, mtr, strace, and ss.
Experience analyzing data at scale using SQL, PromQL, or equivalent.
Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code such as Terraform or Pulumi, and container orchestration such as Kubernetes or Docker.
Track record of building internal tooling or diagnostic utilities that measurably improve team efficiency.
Demonstrated technical leadership, including mentoring engineers, driving cross-team initiatives, and influencing outcomes without direct authority.
Experience applying AI/ML to production engineering or operational workflows.
Comfort engaging directly with enterprise customer engineering teams, including on calls during incidents.

Nice To Haves

Active Cloudflare user with practitioner-level understanding of the platform.
Hands-on experience with Workers, Pages, R2, D1, or other developer platform services.
Cloud networking and security experience across AWS, Azure, or GCP.
Web programming experience with HTML or JavaScript, and experience with regular expressions.
Chaos engineering or familiarity with formal reliability frameworks such as Google SRE principles.
Experience managing or configuring non-HTTP services such as email, authoritative or recursive DNS, FTP, or SSH.

Responsibilities

Own complex, high-severity customer issues end-to-end, from initial signal through confirmed resolution.
Lead deep-dive debugging across edge, network, DNS, transport, APIs, applications, and customer-side configuration; reproduce defects, validate fixes with Engineering, and confirm resolution with customers.
Hold on-call for high-severity incidents as part of a global rotation that includes weekends.
Analyze support and telemetry signals across the customer base to identify systemic reliability risks before they become incidents.
Build or contribute monitoring, detection, diagnostic capabilities, telemetry pipelines, distributed tracing, and automation that reduce detection and resolution time.
Define customer-facing reliability metrics, including error rates, resolution times, and repeat-contact rates, and drive measurable improvement.
Manage technical escalations with clear ownership and timely communication; partner with Product Engineering to deliver fixes, workarounds, and configuration changes.
Represent the customer reliability perspective in engineering syncs, incident reviews, and postmortem processes.
Raise Customer Support's technical capability through pair-debugging, structured knowledge transfer, shared tooling, and documented diagnostic procedures.
Document resolution patterns in runbooks, internal knowledge bases, and AI skills; share incident insights to improve product documentation and operational readiness.
Maintain expertise across Cloudflare's product portfolio and anticipate customer impacts from product releases and architecture changes.
Prototype, deploy, measure, and iterate on AI-assisted diagnostic agents and tools.
Serve as a subject-matter expert in one or more technical domains.

Benefits

Equity plan participation.
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.