Senior Customer Reliability Engineer

Join Cloudflare, a company dedicated to building a better Internet and providing critical infrastructure for banks, governments, media companies, and health systems. As a Senior Customer Reliability Engineer, you will be at the forefront of ensuring the reliability of our systems and directly engaging with our customers. You will be responsible for rapid incident response, proactive reliability engineering, cross-functional partnership, technical leadership, and maintaining deep expertise across Cloudflare's product portfolio.

Chaos engineering or formal reliability frameworks (e.g., Google SRE principles)

Responsibilities

• Rapid response to high-severity customer issues, leading deep-dive debugging across the full stack.
• Proactive engineering to build capabilities that make future incidents less likely, including telemetry pipelines and diagnostic tooling.
• Cross-functional partnership with Product Engineering to drive fixes, workarounds, and configuration changes that address underlying gaps.
• Strong foundation in networking and security:

Core protocols: DNS, HTTP/S, TLS/SSL, SMTP, SNMP, NTP

• Routing protocols: BGP, OSPF, including path selection and route propagation
• Proficiency with observability and diagnostic tooling: packet capture and analysis (Wireshark, tcpdump), log aggregation (Kibana, Elasticsearch), metrics dashboards (Grafana), distributed tracing
• TCP/IP fundamentals: OSI model, IPv4/IPv6 addressing, subnetting, routing, switching
• Zero Trust architecture, network segmentation, modern security models

Requirements

• Experience with incident management, postmortem culture, and SLO/SLI-based reliability practices
• Strong scripting and automation skills (Bash, Python) with a track record of shipping tooling that improves reliability and reduces toil
• Excellent written and verbal communication. Able to convey complex technical information clearly to engineers, leadership, and customers
• Comfort owning ambiguous, cross-layer problems. Composure under pressure during high-severity incidents
• Firewall concepts: stateful/stateless inspection, rule sets, NAT, ACLs
• Minimum 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 environments

VPN and encryption: IPSec, SSL/TLS tunnels, GRE

• SRE, DevOps, or platform engineering experience with direct customer-facing accountability
• Deep 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, ss
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi), and container orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker)

Data-at-scale analysis using SQL, PromQL, or equivalent

• Track record of building internal tooling or diagnostic utilities that measurably improved team efficiency
• Demonstrated technical leadership: mentoring engineers, driving cross-team initiatives, influencing outcomes without direct authority
• Experience applying AI/ML to production engineering or operational workflows
• Comfort engaging directly with enterprise customer engineering teams, including on calls during incidents
• Hands-on experience with Workers, Pages, R2, D1, or other developer platform services
• Active Cloudflare user who understands the platform as a practitioner
• Cloud networking and security experience across AWS, Azure, or GCP
• Web programming (HTML, JavaScript) and regular expressions
• Managing or configuring non-HTTP services: email, DNS authoritative/recursive, FTP, SSH