Senior Customer Reliability Engineer

Cloudflare•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

Cloudflare is hiring a Senior Customer Reliability Engineer to help deliver reliability for customers who depend on Cloudflare as critical infrastructure. The Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) function applies site reliability engineering practices to the systems customers operate on Cloudflare, combining customer-facing engineering with contributions to products and tooling in partnership with Product Engineering. The role combines rapid response to high-severity, complex customer incidents with proactive reliability engineering. The engineer reproduces defects, identifies root causes across Cloudflare infrastructure and customer systems, drives fixes, and confirms resolution. Between incidents, the engineer builds telemetry, detection, diagnostic, and automation capabilities that identify customer issues earlier, prevent recurrence, and reduce operational toil. The position also contributes to AI-native diagnostic agents and tooling that gather relevant logs and configuration, propose evidence-backed diagnoses, and improve engineering effectiveness. The role is available in Lisbon, Portugal, or London, UK. High-severity incident on-call is part of a global rotation that includes weekends. Portugal-based hires have an estimated annual salary range of €61,000–€84,000; the final offer will include time exemption in accordance with applicable law and collective bargaining agreements. The role is eligible for Cloudflare’s equity plan.

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 networking and security foundation, including TCP/IP, 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 stateful and stateless firewall inspection, rule sets, NAT, and ACLs.
Knowledge of VPNs and encryption, including IPSec, SSL/TLS tunnels, and GRE.
Knowledge of 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 Bash and Python scripting and automation skills, 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 skills, including the ability to explain complex technical information to engineers, leadership, and customers.
Ability to own ambiguous, cross-layer problems and remain composed during high-severity incidents.

Nice To Haves

SRE, DevOps, or platform engineering experience with direct customer-facing accountability.
Deep expertise at both L3/L4 network infrastructure and L7 application protocols, including DNS, HTTP, and WebSocket.
Expert-level proficiency with Linux command-line tools such as 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.
A track record of building internal tooling or diagnostic utilities that measurably improved 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.
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 regular expressions.
Experience with chaos engineering or 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 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 on the customer side.
Produce postmortems that other engineers can rely on.
Participate in a global on-call rotation for high-severity incidents, including weekends.
Analyze support and telemetry signals across customers to identify systemic risks before they become incidents.
Contribute monitoring, detection, and diagnostic capabilities to the core product and engineering systems that give Customer Support early visibility into customer-affecting issues.
Define customer-facing reliability metrics, including error rates, resolution times, and repeat-contact rates, and drive measurable improvement.
Build automation that reduces mean time to detect and mean time to resolve.
Manage technical escalations with clear ownership and timely communication.
Partner with Product Engineering to deliver fixes, workarounds, and configuration changes that address underlying gaps.
Represent customer reliability in engineering syncs, incident reviews, and postmortem processes.
Improve Customer Support’s technical capabilities through pair-debugging, structured knowledge transfer, and shared tooling.
Document diagnostic procedures and resolution patterns in runbooks, internal knowledge bases, and AI skills.
Share customer-incident insights to improve product documentation and operational readiness.
Maintain current expertise across Cloudflare products, anticipate customer impact from releases and architecture changes, and serve as a subject-matter expert in one or more domains.
Build or help develop AI agents and tooling for incident pre-diagnosis, evidence gathering, and proposed fixes.