Senior Customer-Facing Infrastructure Engineer

FDE Times; Austin, San Francisco (TX, CA); Hybrid; USD 190,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health & Welfare Benefits

401(k) Retirement Savings Plan

Employee Stock Participation Plan

Flexible paid time off

Job summary

Cloudflare is seeking a Senior Forward Deployed Infrastructure Engineer to join a highly technical, customer-facing team. You will work on embedded capacity projects with strategic customers, guiding hardware deployment, validation, and production handover while ensuring reliability, security, and observability across the stack.

You will collaborate with data center, hardware, and software teams to implement scalable capacity, build automation, and drive operational excellence in demanding,

Qualifications

• 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, provisioning, imaging, configuration management, and fleet-scale lifecycle management.
• Familiarity with server hardware, firmware, BMC/IPMI/Redfish, and diagnostics; able to set validation standards and triage issues remotely.
• Strong understanding of Linux systems and core networking principles (TCP/IP, BGP, DNS, load balancing, data center topologies).
• Proficiency in languages such as Go, Python, or Rust, and infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, Ansible, Salt).
• Experience with production ownership: on-call rotations, incident response, SLO management, reliability engineering.
• Familiarity with monitoring, metrics, and logging frameworks (Prometheus, Grafana, ClickHouse).
• Exposure to Kubernetes or similar platforms and workload scheduling on new capacity.
• Interest or experience in leveraging AI tools to streamline automation, debugging, and documentation.
• Ability to coordinate multi-team delivery efforts across regions and time zones with clear communication.

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: Define acceptance criteria and validation workflows, including burn-in, benchmarking, and health checks across compute, storage, and networking.
• Standards & Operational Readiness: Champion build, configuration, security, and observability standards before capacity launch; ensure monitoring and runbooks are in place.
• Cross-Team Alignment: Serve as central point of collaboration between infrastructure, hardware engineering, data center operations, supply chain, and customer engineering groups.
• Technical Accountability: Act as the primary technical contact for customer infrastructure and guide account strategy and technical direction.
• Reliability & Incident Response: Lead blameless post-incident analysis and improvements.
• Automation & Tooling: Develop production-quality automation for provisioning, validation, and fleet management.
• Capacity Planning & Forecasting: Work with the customer to forecast demand and identify constraints.
• Feedback Loop & Product Influence: Surface real-world issues to inform future roadmaps.
• Strategic Relationship Management: Build trusted technical relationships with senior stakeholders across organizations.
• On-Site Presence: Spend time on-site to foster close communication with customer engineering teams.

Skills

Infrastructure & SRE Background

Capacity & Fleet Operations

Hardware Fluency

Linux & Networking

Automation & Development

Production Ownership

Observability

Containers & Orchestration

AI-Augmented Workflows

Program-Level Coordination

Proactive Problem-Solving

Stakeholder Communication

Tools

Terraform

Ansible

Salt

Go

Python

Rust

Kubernetes

Prometheus

Grafana

ClickHouse

Job description

Cloudflare is seeking a Senior Forward Deployed Infrastructure Engineer to join a highly technical, customer-facing team. You will work on embedded capacity projects with strategic customers, guiding hardware deployment, validation, and production handover while ensuring reliability, security, and observability across the stack.

You will collaborate with data center, hardware, and software teams to implement scalable capacity, build automation, and drive operational excellence in demanding,