Principal Customer Engineer (Central Majors)

Join Cloudflare as a Principal Customer Engineer, where you will be the primary architect of the customer journey, bridging the gap between technical strategy and business value. You will work closely with Account Executives, provide oversight to technical onboarding and implementation, and act as a trusted technical advisor throughout the entire customer lifecycle. This role requires a strong understanding of internet fundamentals, AI proficiency, and exceptional communication skills.

Partner closely with Account Executives to lead technical deep-dive discovery, capture business requirements, and map complex customer infrastructure to fit-for-purpose Cloudflare architectures.

Responsibilities

• Provide oversight to technical onboarding and implementation, but not execute the implementation, serving as the primary executive and engineering contact for the customer.
• Carry a variable quota tied directly to new business acquisition and/or ongoing account growth, and be commercially accountable for ensuring deep platform adoption.

Requirements

• Undergraduate or graduate degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field
• Technical Breadth: We do not expect every candidate to be an expert in every domain. Qualified candidates will demonstrate depth in at least four of the technical areas below:
• Commercial Mindset: Proven track record of operating in a quota-carrying or revenue-aligned environment, with a strong understanding of SaaS metrics, business value translation, and enterprise sales cycles
• Internet fundamentals: Deep understanding of how the Internet works, including OSI Model layers 1–7, BGP, GRE, TCP/UDP, DNS (authoritative and recursive), HTTP(S), and SSL/TLS
• AI Proficiency: Familiarity with prompt engineering, AI-assisted scripting and log analysis, LLM utilization, and workflow automation to augment everyday CE workflows
• Communication: Exceptional presentation and stakeholder management skills, capable of bridging the gap between deep technical implementation details and high-level C-suite business strategy
• Performance: Expertise in the performance of Internet properties, including speed, latency, caching, video streaming, HTTP/2, and TLS 1.3
• Architectural Mindset: Ability to white-board, design, and articulate complex enterprise network and security architectures clearly
• Consultative & Advisory Skills: Excellent communication skills with the ability to translate deeply technical concepts into business outcomes for both hands-on engineers and C-level executives
• Coding/Scripting: Proficiency in Python, JavaScript, Bash, Lua, Go, or similar languages to write custom integration scripts, API connectors, and edge computing functions
• Experience: Experience in a customer-facing technical role, such as Solutions Engineering, Customer Engineering, Professional Services, Sales Engineering, Technical Account Management, or as a Forward Deployed Engineer (years of experience required will vary based on Associate, Senior, Staff, or Principal leveling)
• Developer Platform Fluency: Experience designing, building, deploying or scaling applications using RESTful/GraphQL APIs, SDKs, webhooks, and developer tooling in cloud-native environments. Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi), CI/CD pipelines, and observability for developer-led deployments
• This role may require travel up to 20–50% to attend customer meetings, conferences, industry events, and in-person team collaboration
• Security: Expertise in the security of Internet properties, including WAF, Bot Management, Firewalls, Rate Limiting, (M)TLS, Zero Trust, and SASE concepts
• Technical Enablement: Track record of creating and delivering technical enablement - workshops, code samples, documentation, or developer onboarding - that accelerates customer adoption of complex platforms
• Regulatory Knowledge: Understanding of regulatory requirements such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, and SOC 2
• Hyperscaler / Digital Native Background: Talent coming out of hyperscalers, digital natives, distributed systems environments, or startups is strongly valued for its deeper cloud fluency and advanced architecture depth

Preferred

• Applied AI Knowledge: Experience with LLM orchestration, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures, and model-access controls