Professional Services Engineer

Cloudflare’s Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) program (Or Professional Services Engineer) provides customers with a dedicated, hands-on technical expert embedded directly within their environment. This is not a traditional support or purely advisory engagement—it is a staff-augmentation model where you act as an extension of the customer’s team, taking the lead in managing, optimizing, and evolving their Cloudflare solutions.

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you are a recognized subject-matter expert in your specialization and a trusted advisor to both the customer and Cloudflare leadership. You will own the most complex, high-stakes customer engagements, and contribute to the evolution of Cloudflare's service methodologies and offerings. You operate with a high degree of autonomy, make architectural decisions that impact mission-critical infrastructure, and partner with executive stakeholders to align technical outcomes with business objectives.

This role is ideal for senior technologists who have a proven track record of owning end-to-end customer transformations, leading through influence, and scaling expertise across teams.

• Embed & Integrate: Become a trusted, embedded member of the customer’s technical team, operating within their tools, processes, and change-management frameworks. Follow the customer’s change-management process for all hands-on modifications, ensuring risk mitigation and operational continuity.
• Hands-On Execution: Design, configure, and optimize Cloudflare solutions directly within the customer environment. Implement changes, build prototypes, develop automation scripts, and troubleshoot issues in real time.
• Strategic Advisory & Architecture: Provide proactive architectural guidance, roadmap alignment, and best-practice recommendations. Produce Solution Designs, HLDs, LLDs, databuilds, procedures, test plans, deployment plans, migration plans, as-builts, and other artifacts necessary for delivery and smooth handoff.
• Workshops & Knowledge Transfer: Lead technical workshops, knowledge-transfer sessions, and special-event preparation (e.g., product launches, traffic events, security drills, quarterly business reviews). Ensure continuity by documenting decisions, runbooks, and configurations in the customer’s collaborative workspace.
• Customer Advocacy & Liaison: Act as the voice of the customer within Cloudflare, surfacing product gaps, feature requests, and escalation items to Engineering, Support, and Product. Partner closely with the Account Executive, Solutions Engineer, Customer Success Manager, Delivery Leaders and other stakeholders to align on account strategy and expansion opportunities.

Core Requirements

• 15+ years of experience in a customer-facing technical role.
• Recognized Expertise in one of the following focus areas with a proven track record of leading complex, enterprise-scale engagements:
• Applications — Advanced tuning of WAF, Bot Management, API Gateway, DDoS protection, Rate Limiting, and performance optimization for global web properties. Experience designing security architectures for large-scale, multi-zone deployments.
• Network — Hands-on management of Magic Transit, BYOIP, complex L3/L4 routing, DDoS resilience, and low-latency global connectivity design. Experience with network transformations and MPLS/SD-WAN migrations.
• Leadership & Mentorship — Demonstrated experience mentoring junior team members, leading technical workshops, and contributing to the development of service methodologies, best practices, and reusable assets.
• Strong Networking Foundation — Expert-level understanding of the OSI model, TCP/IP, TLS, DNS, and HTTP.
• Hands-On Technical Skills — Demonstrated ability to implement, configure, and troubleshoot complex solutions. Experience with infrastructure-as-code tools (e.g., Terraform) and scripting (e.g., Python, JavaScript, Bash) is highly desirable.
• Project & Program Management — Ability to manage multiple competing priorities, work to deadlines, and deliver results in ambiguous or fast-moving environments. Experience scoping and estimating complex engagements.
• Communication & Executive Presence — Exceptional verbal and written communication skills. Ability to translate complex technical concepts for executive audiences.