Senior Forward Deployed Infrastructure Engineer

Cloudflare as a Senior Forward Deployed Infrastructure Engineer, where you'll work closely with one of our most strategic customers to ensure modern cloud compute capacity is available, reliable, and ready when needed. You'll guide new capacity from delivery to production, serve as a bridge between Cloudflare's infrastructure, hardware, and data center teams and the customer's engineering organization, and shape how Cloudflare delivers compute capacity at scale.

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

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

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

About Cloudflare

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

At Cloudflare, we know that great candidates come from diverse backgrounds with non-linear paths. You don’t need to tick every single box to be right for this role. If you are excited about building a better Internet and ready to make an impact, please apply

Observability: Familiarity with monitoring, metrics, and logging frameworks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ClickHouse) to maintain system health proactively

Responsibilities

• This role is ideal for engineers who want to stay deeply technical and hands-on with real production infrastructure, guide outcomes from hardware delivery through running workloads, and build long-term, trust-based partnerships with world-class engineering teams.
• Lead the onboarding and delivery of new compute capacity for customers, ensuring predictable, efficient, and repeatable turn-ups.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to validate hardware specifications, define acceptance criteria, and ensure systems meet agreed standards.
• Act as the primary technical point of contact for the customer's infrastructure, guiding account strategy and technical direction.
• Containers & Orchestration: Exposure to Kubernetes or similar platforms and workload scheduling on newly provisioned capacity
• Hardware Fluency: Familiarity with server hardware, firmware, BMC/IPMI/Redfish, and diagnostics. Ability to set validation standards, triage issues remotely, and partner with on-site technicians. Experience with GPUs or specialized accelerators is a plus
• Program-Level Coordination: Demonstrated ability to coordinate complex, multi-team delivery efforts across regions and time zones with clear communication and alignment
• Capacity & Fleet Operations: Practical experience bringing server capacity online, encompassing provisioning, imaging, configuration management, and fleet-scale lifecycle management
• Proactive Problem-Solving: A self-motivated approach to identifying bottlenecks—whether technical or procedural—and collaborating with partners to implement durable fixes

Requirements

• Automation & Development: 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)
• Linux & Networking: Strong understanding of Linux systems and core networking principles (TCP/IP, BGP, DNS, load balancing, and data center topologies)
• Production Ownership: Experience supporting mission-critical services, including on-call rotations, incident response, SLO management, and reliability engineering
• AI-Augmented Workflows: Interest or experience in leveraging modern AI tools to streamline automation, debugging, and documentation
• Stakeholder Communication: Ability to engage comfortably in strategic technical discussions with executive-level stakeholders, translating infrastructure context into business outcomes
• Infrastructure & SRE Background: Solid experience in infrastructure engineering, SRE, or production engineering, with a track record of running and scaling large-scale production systems
• Prior experience at a hyperscaler, cloud provider, or large-scale data center environment

Preferred

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

Pay

USD 194,000 - 266,000