Senior Customer Engineer, Japan

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. Location: Tokyo, Japan About the Role At Cloudflare, we are on a mission to help build a better Internet. As the architectural complexity of enterprise solutions scales, we are evolving how we partner with our customers. The Customer Engineer (CE) represents the core driver of our technical go-to-market strategy: a trusted advisor who owns the technical relationship from the initial discovery phase through to long-term adoption and ongoing account expansion. Sitting within the GTM organization and reporting to the Regional Customer Engineering Leader, you will not hand off your customers once an initial agreement is reached. Instead, you will operate as a quota-carrying technologist, utilizing AI-augmented workflows to eliminate administrative toil so you can focus on high-value architectural design and driving measurable business outcomes across the entire customer journey. Key Responsibilities • Technical Validation: Partner closely with Account Executives to lead technical discovery, build bespoke architectures, and deliver compelling product demonstrations and Proof of Concepts (PoCs) across Cloudflare’s portfolio (Security, Networking, Zero Trust and Developer Platforms). • Trusted Advisory: Act as a trusted technical advisor throughout the entire customer lifecycle, maintaining a continuous, deep relationship with key stakeholders from initial onboarding through maturity, renewal, and expansion. • Strategic Alignment: Own the long-term technical relationship across the entire customer lifecycle, ensuring continuous alignment between the customer’s evolving business goals and our product roadmap. • Commercial Accountability & Expansion: Carry a variable quota tied directly to new business acquisition and/or ongoing account growth. You will be commercially accountable for ensuring deep platform adoption, retaining revenue, and identifying strategic cross-sell and up-sell opportunities based on product usage data. Lead technical Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) to translate platform capabilities into return on investment for C-level executives. • AI Orchestration & Workflow Automation: Act as an "AI-Augmented" engineer. Leverage AI agents and internal platforms to automate routine tasks such as RFP/Security Questionnaire responses, sandbox provisioning, and basic telemetry monitoring, reclaiming your time for strategic customer advisory. Minimum Qualifications • Experience: Experience in a customer-facing technical role, such as Solutions Engineering, Customer Engineering, Sales Engineering, or as a Forward Deployed Engineer. • Technical Acumen: Broad technical expertise spanning web security, networking (routing, DNS, DDoS mitigation), cloud infrastructure, and enterprise architecture. • 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. • Communication: Exceptional presentation and stakeholder management skills, capable of bridging the gap between deep technical implementation details and high-level C-suite business strategy. Strongly Preferred Qualifications (The "Good-to-Haves") • Cloudflare Developer Stack Experience: Hands-on experience building, deploying, or architecting solutions using Cloudflare's developer platform and AI ecosystem, specifically Workers AI and AI Gateway. • Applied AI Knowledge: Experience with prompt engineering, Large Language Model (LLM) orchestration, or Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures. • Coding/Scripting: Proficiency in Python, JavaScript, or similar languages to write custom integration scripts, API connectors, and edge computing functions. Compensation This role features a competitive base salary and a variable commission structure tied directly to the successful execution of full-lifecycle commercial targets, including new business acquisition, ongoing adoption milestones, and overall account expansion. 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 attack