Senior Forward Deployed Engineer (DevOps)

Cloudflare•San Francisco, CA

1d•$194,000 - $266,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Cloudflare's Senior Forward Deployed Infrastructure Engineers work where Cloudflare's infrastructure meets customer impact. As a Forward Deployed Infrastructure Engineer, you will be embedded with one of Cloudflare's 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 Cloudflare's data center and hardware teams to ensure systems pass validation, come online smoothly, and uphold Cloudflare's high standards. You will serve as a bridge connecting Cloudflare's infrastructure, hardware, and data center teams with the customer's engineering organization. You'll 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, and build long-term, trust-based partnerships with world-class engineering teams.

Requirements

Solid experience in infrastructure engineering, SRE, or production engineering, with a track record of running and scaling large-scale production systems.
Practical experience bringing server capacity online, encompassing provisioning, imaging, configuration management, and fleet-scale lifecycle management.
Familiarity with server hardware, firmware, BMC/IPMI/Redfish, and diagnostics. Ability to set validation standards, triage issues remotely, and partner with on-site technicians.
Strong understanding of Linux systems and core networking principles (TCP/IP, BGP, DNS, load balancing, and data center topologies).
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).
Experience supporting mission-critical services, including on-call rotations, incident response, SLO management, and reliability engineering.
Familiarity with monitoring, metrics, and logging frameworks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ClickHouse) to maintain system health proactively.
Exposure to Kubernetes or similar platforms and workload scheduling on newly provisioned capacity.
Interest or experience in leveraging modern AI tools to streamline automation, debugging, and documentation.
Demonstrated ability to coordinate complex, multi-team delivery efforts across regions and time zones with clear communication and alignment.
A self-motivated approach to identifying bottlenecks—whether technical or procedural—and collaborating with partners to implement durable fixes.
Ability to engage comfortably in strategic technical discussions with executive-level stakeholders, translating infrastructure context into business outcomes.

Nice To Haves

Experience with GPUs or specialized accelerators is a plus.
Prior experience at a hyperscaler, cloud provider, or large-scale data center environment.
Familiarity with Cloudflare's 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.

Responsibilities

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.
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.
Champion Cloudflare's build, configuration, security, and observability standards prior to capacity launch. Ensure comprehensive monitoring, alerting, and runbooks are established for all production systems.
Act as the central point of collaboration between Cloudflare's infrastructure, hardware engineering, data center operations, supply chain, and network teams, alongside the customer's engineering group.
Serve as the primary technical point of contact for the customer's infrastructure, guiding account strategy and technical direction for supporting Cloudflare resources.
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.
Develop production-quality automation and tooling for provisioning, validation, and fleet management to continually improve rollout efficiency.
Partner with the customer to understand future demand, forecast capacity needs, and proactively identify constraints.
Surface real-world operational issues and platform opportunities with Cloudflare's Infrastructure, Hardware, and Product teams to inform future roadmaps.
Cultivate trusted technical relationships with senior stakeholders (Staff+ engineers, Directors, and VPs) across both organizations.
Spend time regularly on-site at customer offices to foster close communication and partnership with their engineering teams.

Benefits

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