Senior Customer Reliability Engineer

Cloudflare, Inc.; United Kingdom; Hybride; GBP 120 000 - 160 000; Plein temps

Avantages offerts par ce poste

Competitive pay package

Take-what-you-need vacation

Paid maternity & paternity leave

Healthcare benefits

Résumé du poste

Cloudflare, Inc. is expanding its Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) organization to directly engage with our most demanding customers at scale.

You will own high-severity incidents end-to-end, reproduce issues, and drive fixes across edge, network, DNS, and APIs, while shaping proactive reliability capabilities with Product Engineering. You will work with platform teams to build telemetry, detectors, and diagnostic tooling that reduce toil and improve incident response.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in SRE/escalation engineering or equivalent
• Experience with incident management and postmortems
• Strong scripting and automation to reduce toil

Responsabilités

• Own Sev-1 incidents end-to-end, reproduce, isolate root cause, drive fixes with Eng
• Lead postmortems and incident reviews
• Build and improve telemetry, detectors, and logging across Cloudflare platform
• Collaborate with Product Engineering and platform teams to reduce recurrence risk
• Represent CRE in cross-team incident communications and runbooks

Connaissances

Customer reliability engineering

SRE practices

Incident management

Observability tooling

Linux proficiency

Networking fundamentals

Cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP)

AI/ML in operations

Formation

Bachelor's degree in CS or related field

Outils

Kibana/Elasticsearch

Grafana

Prometheus

Terraform

Kubernetes

Docker

Description du poste

• Cloudflare built its reputation helping build a better Internet, defending millions of sites, giving away SSL and DDoS mitigation when the industry charged premium prices
• In an acceleratingly dangerous world, the scope of that mission has changed
• We are becoming something more: critical infrastructure
• Banks run their payment rails on us
• Governments run public services on us
• Media companies depend on us during live events
• Health systems depend on us to provide care
• Reliability for these customers is no longer a feature of our product
• It is a mission
• Serving that customer base demands a different operating model
• Traditional support organizations route tickets
• Traditional engineering organizations ship features
• Neither alone is enough when the stakes are this high
• We are pivoting to something different: a customer-facing engineering organization, directly engaged with our customers at scale
• This is work a central dev team cannot do from the inside of the network
• The Customer Reliability Engineering function is the spine of that pivot
• CRE is SRE applied outward, the same engineering discipline, applied to the reliability of the systems our customers run on Cloudflare
• You are the engineer who owns the problems that matter most to the customers who matter most, and you contribute directly to our products and tooling, in partnership with Product Engineering, to hold that standard across the entire customer base
• CRE is a rapid response team and a proactive engineering team. You fix things at the edge as they come up, and you help build the product capabilities that identify customer issues before they become a crisis. Both modes are equally core
• Rapid response. When a customer issue surfaces that is high-severity, cross-layer and complex, you are the engineer who answers. You reproduce the defect, isolate the root cause across Cloudflare’s infrastructure and the customer’s stack, drive the fix with Product Engineering, and confirm resolution. You hold on-call for high-severity incidents as part of a global shift rotation
• Proactive engineering. When no fire is burning, you work with Product Engineering and our platform teams to build the capabilities that make the next fire cheaper or unnecessary: telemetry pipelines that correlate signals across the customer base, detectors that fire before a human notices, diagnostic tooling that scales across hundreds of customers, automation that reduces toil for Customer Support. Every incident you carry generates engineering output that reduces the cost of recurrence. The work compounds
• Cloudflare is building CRE as an AI-native function. You will work with and help build agents and tooling that pre-diagnose incidents, surface relevant logs and configuration, and propose fixes with cited evidence. Engineers who ship AI-assisted diagnostics are the ones defining this discipline
• What You Might Work On:
• Rapid response:
• Own a Sev-1 incident where a large financial services customer sees asymmetric latency from a single POP. Trace it through BGP routing and origin configuration. Produce the fix upstream
• Diagnose a recurring WebSocket disconnect that a media customer has been fighting for weeks. Isolate it to a specific interaction between WAF and their origin load balancer. Drive the fix with Product Engineering
• Partner with a government customer’s SRE team during an active DDoS event. Help them shape their Magic Transit and WAF configuration in real time
• Proactive engineering:
• Build, with Product Engineering, a distributed tracing capability that correlates Cloudflare edge signals with customer origin metrics so a single query tells the story of a failing request end-to-end
• Ship a detector for a class of WAF false positives silently degrading several customers. Get it into production before the next renewal cycle
• Prototype an AI agent that takes a new customer case, pulls relevant logs and config, and proposes a root cause with linked evidence. Deploy it internally. Measure whether it makes engineers faster. Iterate
• Rapid incident response and root cause analysis. Own the most complex, high-severity customer issues end-to-end, from first signal through confirmed resolution. Lead deep-dive debugging across the full stack: edge, network, DNS, transport, APIs, application, customer-side configuration. Reproduce defects, validate fixes with Engineering, and confirm customer-side resolution. Produce postmortems other engineers rely on. Hold on-call for high-severity incidents as part of a global rotation that includes weekends
• Proactive reliability engineering. Analyze support and telemetry signals across the customer base to find systemic risks before they become incidents. Contribute monitoring, detection, and diagnostic capability to the core product and the engineering systems that give Customer Support early visibility into customer-affecting issues. Define customer-facing reliability metrics (error rates, resolution times, repeat-contact rates) and drive measurable improvement. Write automation that reduces mean-time-to-detect and mean-time-to-resolve
• Cross-functional partnership. Manage the technical escalation lifecycle with clear ownership and timely communication. Partner with Product Engineering to drive fixes, workarounds, and configuration changes that address underlying gaps. Represent the customer reliability perspective in engineering syncs, incident reviews, and post-mortem processes
• Technical leadership and enablement. Raise the technical floor of Customer Support through pair-debugging, structured knowledge transfer, and shared tooling. Document diagnostic procedures and resolution patterns in runbooks, internal knowledge bases, and AI skills. Share insights from customer-facing incidents to improve product documentation and operational readiness
• Product and platform depth. Maintain deep, current expertise across Cloudflare’s product portfolio: edge networking, DNS, CDN, WAF, DDoS mitigation, Zero Trust, Workers, and our developer platform. Anticipate customer impact from new releases and architecture changes. Serve as a go-to subject-matter expert in one or more domains

Benefits

• Competitive pay: We offer a competitive total rewards package, where every employee is an owner of our stock.
• Take-what-you-need vacation: We encourage employees to find a comfortable work-life balance by taking as many days off as they need while still being able to perform their jobs satisfactorily. (We really mean it!)
• Paid maternity & paternity leave: Our global parental leave policy allows up to sixteen paid weeks of bonding leave time for all qualifying new parents.
• Employee benefits: We offer a comprehensive benefits package including healthcare, life insurance, short- and long-term disability, pension plans in accordance with the market practice in our locations.
• Commuter program: We are flexible about where we work and value connecting at the office. Our commuter benefits program is in place to support team members’ commute to work via public transportation without the extra cost burden.
• Wellbeing: Global offerings that provide mental health, childcare and family forming support to our employees across our offices.

Strong foundation in networking and security:Experience with incident management, postmortem culture, and SLO/SLI-based reliability practicesStrong scripting and automation skills (Bash, Python) with a track record of shipping tooling that improves reliability and reduces toilExcellent written and verbal communication. Able to convey complex technical information clearly to engineers, leadership, and customersComfort owning ambiguous, cross-layer problems. Composure under pressure during high-severity incidentsCore protocols: DNS, HTTP/S, TLS/SSL, SMTP, SNMP, NTPRouting protocols: BGP, OSPF, including path selection and route propagationProficiency with observability and diagnostic tooling: packet capture and analysis (Wireshark, tcpdump), log aggregation (Kibana, Elasticsearch), metrics dashboards (Grafana), distributed tracingFirewall concepts: stateful/stateless inspection, rule sets, NAT, ACLsTCP/IP fundamentals: OSI model, IPv4/IPv6 addressing, subnetting, routing, switchingZero Trust architecture, network segmentation, modern security modelsMinimum 5 years of hands-on experience in site reliability engineering, escalation engineering, systems engineering, or a comparable deeply technical support / operations role, with at least 2 years in customer-facing environmentsVPN and encryption: IPSec, SSL/TLS tunnels, GRESRE, DevOps, or platform engineering experience with direct customer-facing accountabilityDeep expertise at both L3/L4 (network infrastructure) and L7 (application protocols, DNS, HTTP, WebSocket)Expert-level proficiency with Linux command-line tools: curl, dig, git, traceroute, mtr, strace, ssFamiliarity with CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi), and container orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker)Data-at-scale analysis using SQL, PromQL, or equivalentTrack record of building internal tooling or diagnostic utilities that measurably improved team efficiencyDemonstrated technical leadership: mentoring engineers, driving cross-team initiatives, influencing outcomes without direct authorityExperience applying AI/ML to production engineering or operational workflowsComfort engaging directly with enterprise customer engineering teams, including on calls during incidentsHands-on experience with Workers, Pages, R2, D1, or other developer platform servicesActive Cloudflare user who understands the platform as a practitionerCloud networking and security experience across AWS, Azure, or GCPWeb programming (HTML, JavaScript) and regular expressionsManaging or configuring non-HTTP services: email, DNS authoritative/recursive, FTP, SSHChaos engineering or formal reliability frameworks (e.g., Google SRE principles)