Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

Cloudflare•San Francisco, CA

2d•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 who are building complex applications on our developer platform. You will collaborate closely with their engineering teams to shape architecture, prototype solutions, review code, and resolve challenging technical issues that hinder their progress towards production. Your goal is to enable customers to build faster and scale further on Cloudflare. This role operates on a one-to-many model, where you will leverage patterns, reference implementations, and lessons learned across your customer portfolio to benefit each engagement. While customers initially engage with the developer platform, your support extends to the full range of Cloudflare's offerings. You will function as a technical force multiplier, assisting customers with their deployments, 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.
Proven track record of delivering production-grade systems.
Experience owning mission-critical services with real-world users.
Understanding of on-call rotations, incident response, and architectural rigor for high uptime.
Currently active in development (in the IDE) with 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 database optimization and distributed infrastructure.
Experience integrating AI-augmented workflows (e.g., Windsurf, OpenCode) into the daily development cycle.
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.
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.
Previous experience at a fast-paced startup or in a customer-facing engineering role where you operated directly within a partner’s codebase.
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

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
Equity participation in Cloudflare’s equity plan.