Senior Engineering Manager, Observability

Webhosting; Austin, Northern (TX, KY); Hybrid; USD 220,000 - 303,000; Full time

Job summary

Cloudflare is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager, Observability, to lead a high-velocity, customer-obsessed team focused on making telemetry discoverable and actionable. The role spans multiple locations, including Austin, NY, Lisbon, and London, and requires deep experience with complex, data-driven platforms.

The candidate will define technical and product vision, mentor engineers, and grow a scalable observability platform across distributed teams, emphasizing reliability and rapid

Qualifications

• Minimum 8 years of relevant industry experience.
• At least 4 years leading software engineering teams.
• Proven track record shipping and operating large-scale systems.

Responsibilities

• Define technical and product vision with PMs and engineers.
• Build and own an observability platform for AI-driven ecosystems.
• Own SLOs, incident response, and debt management.
• Hire, mentor, and grow senior engineers and foster an inclusive team.
• Collaborate with platform and product teams to surface meaningful data.

Skills

Engineering leadership

People management

Observability experience

System design

Cross-functional leadership

Tools

Grafana

Elasticsearch

Kibana

ClickHouse

Job description

Senior Engineering Manager, Observability

Cloudflare ·United States, Austin, TX / Lisbon, Portugal / London, United Kingdom / New York, NY

Job Description

About Us

At Cloudflare, we are on a mission to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world’s largest networks that powers millions of websites and other Internet properties for customers ranging from individual bloggers to SMBs to Fortune 500 companies. Cloudflare protects and accelerates any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. Internet properties powered by Cloudflare all have web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with every request. As a result, they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. Cloudflare was named to Entrepreneur Magazine’s Top Company Cultures list and ranked among the World’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company.

At Cloudflare, we’re not looking for people who wait for a polished roadmap; we’re looking for the builders who see the cracks in the Internet that everyone else has simply learned to live with. We value candidates who have the instinct to spot a “normalized” problem and the AI-native curiosity to create a solution using the latest tools. Our culture is built on iteration, leveraging AI to ship faster today to make it better tomorrow, while ensuring that every improvement, no matter how small, is shared across the team to lift everyone up. If you’re the type of person who values curiosity over bureaucracy, and that AI is a partner in solving tough problems to keep the Internet moving forward, you’ll fit right in.

Available Locations:Austin, TX | New York, NY | Lisbon, Portugal | London, UK

About the Role

As the Engineering Manager for our Developer Observability Platform you will manage a high-velocity customer-obsessed team. Your mission will be to empower customers by making their telemetry discoverable and actionable in one place.

The team is international and distributed, they move fast and are deeply attuned to customer feedback. They bring a deep range of observability experience from major companies and fast-moving startups. This is a deeply cross‑functional role that will need to understand the nuances of monitoring some of our most complex and high volume primitives such as Workers, Workers for Platforms, Agents, and Durable Objects. This is a high‑visibility role that will be directly interfacing with some of our biggest customers.

Responsibilities

Deliver excellent customer outcomes above all else. Whatever is required – building, planning, deciding, designing, communicating – you are accountable and get it done.

• Set the technical and product vision along with your PM and Engineers. Build the right thing at the right time.

Building an observability platform for the current AI driven ecosystem. Agents empower new types of platforms capabilities even as they require new types of observability.

Own the operational aspects of your platform such as SLOs, incident response, customer escalations, and technical debt. Reliability is its own feature.

Recruit, mentor, and grow engineers. We have a high bar and expect you to raise it.

Cultivate a team culture that values fast iteration, high agency, and ownership.

Work cross‑functionally with a range of platform and product teams to instrument and surface meaningful data in actionable ways.

A minimum of 8 years of relevant industry experience, including at least 4 years managing software engineering teams.

Proven track record leading teams that have shipped and operated complex, large‑scale systems and data‑driven applications. Preferably in observability, developer platforms, cloud infrastructure, edge/proxy systems, or high‑scale APIs.

Significant technical depth, with the ability to guide architectural discussions, make credible technical decisions, review designs, and unblock your team.

Strong developer tools taste. You have used and built enough observability products to know what makes them delightful or painful.

Demonstrated ability to hire, coach, and develop senior engineers, and to build high‑performing, inclusive teams that ship. You care about teams and team culture.

A hands‑on approach to leadership: you consider yourself a builder, stay close to the code, know the numbers, know the customer, and know what to build next.

Bonus Points

Working on hosted customer‑facing observability products

Instrumenting observability in global‑scale, production environments

Implementing observability (OTLP, OLAP databases such as Clickhouse, Grafana, Elasticsearch, Kibana, etc)

Experience building with Cloudflare’s Developer Platform and have opinions on where we could improve, especially with respect to observability.

Compensation

Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.

• For NY‑based hires: Estimated annual salary of $220,000 – $303,000
• For Portugal‑based hires: Estimated annual salary of €89,000 – €122,000

Equity

This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan.

Health & Welfare Benefits

• Time Off

What Makes Cloudflare Special?

We’re not just a highly ambitious, large‑scale technology company. We’re a highly ambitious, large‑scale technology company with a soul. Fundamental to our mission to help build a better Internet is protecting the free and open Internet.

Project Galileo

Since 2014, we’ve equipped more than 2,400 journalism and civil society organizations in 111 countries with powerful tools to defend themselves against attacks that would otherwise censor their work, technology already used by Cloudflare’s enterprise customers–at no cost.

Athenian Project

In 2017, we created the Athenian Project to ensure that state and local governments have the highest level of protection and reliability for free, so that their constituents have access to election information and voter registration. Since the project, we’ve provided services to more than 425 local government election websites in 33 states.

1.1.1.1

We released 1.1.1.1 to help fix the foundation of the Internet by building a faster, more secure and privacy‑centric public DNS resolver. This is available publicly for everyone to use – it is the first consumer‑focused service Cloudflare has ever released. Here’s the deal – we don’t store client IP addresses never, ever. We will continue to abide by our privacy commitment and ensure that no user data is sold to advertisers or used to target consumers.

Please note that applicants who progress to the offer stage of the interview process may be asked to attend an in‑person interview within one of the Cloudflare Offices or Cloudflare Hubs. More details about this will be available at that stage of the interview process.

This position may require access to information protected under U.S. export control laws, including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations. Please note that any offer of employment may be conditioned on your authorization to receive software or technology controlled under these U.S. export laws without sponsorship for an export license.

Cloudflare is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunity for all people and place great value in both diversity and inclusiveness. All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to their, or any other person’s, perceived or actual race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, family care status, or any other basis protected by law. We are an AA/Veterans/Disabled Employer.

Cloudflare provides reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities. Please tell us if you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job. Examples of reasonable accommodations include, but are not limited to, changing the application process, providing documents in an alternate format, using a sign language interpreter, or using specialized equipment. If you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job, please contact us via e‑mail at [e-mail] or via mail at 101 Townsend St. San Francisco, CA 94107.