Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

Cloudflare•San Francisco, CA

40d•Onsite

About The Position

As a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), you will act as a hands-on, consultative build partner for a portfolio of Cloudflare's most strategic customers. You will collaborate closely with their engineering teams to shape architecture, prototype solutions, review code, and resolve complex technical challenges that hinder their progress towards production. This role involves a one-to-many approach, where you will leverage patterns, reference implementations, and lessons learned across your customer portfolio to benefit each engagement. While customers initially engage with the Cloudflare developer platform, your support will extend to the full breadth of the Cloudflare platform. You will function as a technical force multiplier, assisting customers in shipping their products, enhancing the quality of their work, and providing valuable product insights back to Cloudflare's Product and Engineering teams.

Requirements

7+ years of professional software engineering experience, including time in a customer-facing engineering role — such as forward deployed, solutions or sales engineering, professional services, or developer relations — where you worked hands-on with external engineering teams.
Proven track record of delivering production-grade systems.
Experience with modern languages like TypeScript, Rust, and Go.
A "ship-first" mentality and high velocity, staying current with modern frameworks, languages, and deployment patterns.
Broad technical fluency across the entire stack — from frontend performance and backend logic to data/storage and distributed infrastructure.
Experience owning mission-critical services with real-world users, understanding production rigor, incident response urgency, and the architectural discipline required to run highly available systems.
Experience integrating AI-augmented workflows (e.g., Windsurf, OpenCode) into your daily development cycle to accelerate prototyping and delivery.
Ability to decompose complex business requirements into scalable, resilient technical architectures.
Deep experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including an understanding of serverless, networking, and security primitives.
Self-starter who thrives in "zero-to-one" environments and owns solutions end-to-end.
Comfortable engaging in high-stakes technical and strategic discussions with VP-level stakeholders, with the ability to translate complex engineering trade-offs into business impact.

Nice To Haves

Direct experience building on Cloudflare Workers or the broader Cloudflare Developer Platform.
A visible public profile, including open-source contributions, technical blogging, or speaking engagements at industry conferences.

Responsibilities

Act as the hands-on technical build partner across a portfolio of strategic customers building on the Cloudflare platform, driving each engagement forward from idea to launch.
Shape scalable, resilient architectures on Cloudflare and guide customers on the design decisions that matter — before they become bottlenecks.
Hands-on development alongside customer teams to prototype, configure, and build reference implementations that demonstrate the right way to solve a problem on Cloudflare.
Review customer code and share the best practices that raise the quality, performance, and security of what they build.
Diagnose and resolve hard technical problems across the stack, removing the blockers between customers and a successful launch.
Write reference code, samples, and technical guidance that customers can learn from, build on, and reuse.
Support the full breadth of the Cloudflare platform when engaged — from Workers, storage (KV, R2, D1), and Durable Objects to AI (Workers AI, AI Gateway, Vectorize), security, networking, and observability.
Join Customer Engineering rituals — design reviews, planning sessions, and technical working sessions.
Surface real-world edge cases, friction, and product gaps directly to Cloudflare's Product and Engineering teams to shape the product roadmap.
Establish and maintain trusted technical relationships with customer engineers and technical leaders (Staff+ engineers, Directors, and VPs).
Identify opportunities to accelerate the adoption of Cloudflare services, unlocking new capabilities across each customer's tech stack.

Benefits

Cloudflare protects and accelerates any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code.
Cloudflare was named to Entrepreneur Magazine’s Top Company Cultures list and ranked among the World’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company.
Our culture is built on iteration, leveraging AI to ship faster today to make it better tomorrow, while ensuring that every improvement, no matter how small, is shared across the team to lift everyone up.
We value candidates who have the instinct to spot a "normalized" problem and the AI-native curiosity to create a solution using the latest tools.
We’re not just a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company. We’re a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company with a soul.
Fundamental to our mission to help build a better Internet is protecting the free and open Internet.
Project Galileo: Since 2014, we've equipped more than 2,400 journalism and civil society organizations in 111 countries with powerful tools to defend themselves against attacks that would otherwise censor their work, technology already used by Cloudflare’s enterprise customers--at no cost.
Athenian Project: In 2017, we created the Athenian Project to ensure that state and local governments have the highest level of protection and reliability for free, so that their constituents have access to election information and voter registration. Since the project, we've provided services to more than 425 local government election websites in 33 states.
1.1.1.1: We released 1.1.1.1 to help fix the foundation of the Internet by building a faster, more secure and privacy-centric public DNS resolver. This is available publicly for everyone to use - it is the first consumer-focused service Cloudflare has ever released.
We don’t store client IP addresses never, ever. We will continue to abide by our privacy commitment and ensure that no user data is sold to advertisers or used to target consumers.
Cloudflare is proud to be an equal opportunity employer.
We are committed to providing equal employment opportunity for all people and place great value in both diversity and inclusiveness.
All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to their, or any other person's, perceived or actual race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, family care status, or any other basis protected by law.
We are an AA/Veterans/Disabled Employer.
Cloudflare provides reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities.
If you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job, please contact us via e-mail at [email protected] or via mail at 101 Townsend St. San Francisco, CA 94107.