Senior Customer Engineer, Strategic - Seattle, WA

The Customer Engineer (CE) is the core driver of our technical go-to-market strategy: a trusted technical advisor and primary architect of the customer journey. You will bridge the gap between technical strategy and business value, guiding enterprise clients from initial pre-sales technical validation through onboarding, deployment architecture, and full lifecycle expansion. Sitting within the GTM organization and reporting to a Customer Engineering Leader, you will not hand off your customers once an initial agreement is reached. Instead, you will operate as a quota-carrying technologist, leveraging AI-augmented workflows to eliminate administrative toil so you can focus on high-value architectural design and driving measurable business outcomes across the entire customer journey.

Responsibilities

Partner with Account Executives to lead technical deep-dive discovery, capture business requirements, and map complex customer infrastructure (DNS, CDN, Zero Trust, Network Security, Workers) to Cloudflare architectures; Define, scope, and evaluate Proof of Concepts (PoCs) and Technical Validations; Deliver tailored technical presentations, architectural diagrams, and demonstrations; Address technical objections, security compliance questions, and edge-case architectural requirements during the sales cycle; Take accountability for solution deployment strategy (Customer, Partner or Cloudflare Professional services); Provide oversight of technical onboarding and implementation without executing it; Design structured migration and onboarding blueprints and guide customer engineering teams; Monitor customer health scores and telemetry to ensure time-to-value, resolve integration bottlenecks, and reduce deployment risk; Carry a variable quota tied to new business acquisition and/or account growth; Drive deep platform adoption, revenue retention, and cross-sell and up-sell opportunities; Lead technical Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) for C-level executives; Act as a trusted technical advisor across the customer lifecycle; Leverage AI agents, LLMs, and internal platforms to automate routine tasks; Partner with the Enablement Team to design, build, and govern technical resources and SOPs

Requirements

Experience in a customer-facing technical role, such as Solutions Engineering, Customer Engineering, Professional Services, Sales Engineering, Technical Account Management, or as a Forward Deployed Engineer (years of experience vary by Associate, Senior, Staff, or Principal leveling); Ability to white-board, design, and articulate complex enterprise network and security architectures clearly; Excellent communication skills with the ability to translate deeply technical concepts into business outcomes for hands-on engineers and C-level executives; Proven track record of operating in a quota-carrying or revenue-aligned environment, with a strong understanding of SaaS metrics, business value translation, and enterprise sales cycles; Exceptional presentation and stakeholder management skills; Depth in at least four technical areas: Internet fundamentals (OSI layers 1-7, BGP, GRE, TCP/UDP, DNS, HTTP(S), SSL/TLS), Security (WAF, Bot Management, Firewalls, Rate Limiting, (M)TLS, Zero Trust, SASE), Performance (speed, latency, caching, video streaming, HTTP/2, TLS 1.3), AI Proficiency (prompt engineering, AI-assisted scripting, LLM utilization, workflow automation), Coding/Scripting (Python, JavaScript, Bash, Lua, Go, or similar), Developer Platform Fluency (RESTful/GraphQL APIs, SDKs, webhooks, Terraform, Pulumi, CI/CD, observability); Undergraduate or graduate degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (listed under Education)

Nice to have

Track record of creating and delivering technical enablement (workshops, code samples, documentation, developer onboarding); Experience with LLM orchestration, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures, and model-access controls; Understanding of regulatory requirements such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, and SOC 2; Background from hyperscalers, digital natives, distributed systems environments, or startups

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; Eligibility for equity plan; Eligibility for incentive compensation under Cloudflare's Sales Compensation Plan