Senior Forward Deployed Infrastructure Engineer

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.

Responsibilities

Capacity Onboarding & Delivery: Lead bringing new compute capacity online for the customer, collaborating on planning, provisioning, validation, and handover to production; Hardware & Spec Validation: Partner with teams to ensure delivered systems meet agreed specifications, define acceptance criteria and validation workflows, including burn-in, benchmarking, and health checks; Standards & Operational Readiness: Champion Cloudflare's build, configuration, security, and observability standards prior to capacity launch, and ensure monitoring, alerting, and runbooks are established; Cross-Team Alignment: 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; Technical Accountability: Serve as the primary technical point of contact for the customer's infrastructure; Reliability & Incident Response: Engage in standups, capacity reviews, change management, and incident response, and facilitate blameless root-cause analysis; Automation & Tooling: Develop production-quality automation and tooling for provisioning, validation, and fleet management; Capacity Planning & Forecasting: Partner with the customer to understand future demand and proactively identify constraints; Feedback Loop & Product Influence: Surface real-world operational issues and platform opportunities with Cloudflare's Infrastructure, Hardware, and Product teams; Strategic Relationship Management: Cultivate trusted technical relationships with senior stakeholders; On-Site Presence: Spend time regularly on-site at customer offices

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, with 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); 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; A self-motivated approach to identifying bottlenecks and collaborating with partners to implement durable fixes; Ability to engage in strategic technical discussions with executive-level stakeholders

Nice to have

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; Experience with GPUs or specialized accelerators

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