Senior Forward Deployed Infrastructure Engineer

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. Available Locations Hybrid | Austin, San Francisco About the Role Cloudflare's Senior Forward Deployed Infrastructure Engineers work where Cloudflare's infrastructure meets customer impact. As a Forward Deployed Infrastructure Engineer, you will be embedded with one of Cloudflare's most strategic customers, collaborating to ensure modern cloud compute capacity is available, reliable, and ready when needed. You will guide new capacity from delivery to production, partnering with Cloudflare's data center and hardware teams to ensure systems pass validation, come online smoothly, and uphold Cloudflare's high standards. You will serve as a bridge connecting Cloudflare's infrastructure, hardware, and data center teams with the customer's engineering organization. You'll ensure teams work from a shared vision, clear operational roadblocks, and feed real-world insights back into how Cloudflare builds and evolves its platform. 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. • Shape how Cloudflare delivers compute capacity at scale. • Build long-term, trust-based partnerships with world-class engineering teams. Responsibilities • Capacity Onboarding & Delivery: Lead bringing new compute capacity online for the customer, collaborating on planning, provisioning, validation, and handover to production. Drive turn-ups that are predictable, efficient, and repeatable. • Hardware & Spec Validation: Partner with teams to ensure delivered systems meet agreed specifications. Define acceptance criteria and validation workflows, including burn-in, benchmarking, and health checks across compute, storage, and networking. Work alongside on-site data center teams to execute checks and resolve issues. • Standards & Operational Readiness: Champion Cloudflare's build, configuration, security, and observability standards prior to capacity launch. Ensure comprehensive monitoring, alerting, and runbooks are established for all production systems. • Cross-Team Alignment: Act as the central point of collaboration between Cloudflare's infrastructure, hardware engineering, data center operations, supply chain, and network teams, alongside the customer's engineering group. • Technical Accountability: Serve as the primary technical point of contact for the customer's infrastructure, guiding account strategy and technical direction for supporting Cloudflare resources. • Reliability & Incident Response: Engage in operational rhythms with the customer and Cloudflare, including standups, capacity reviews, change management, and incident response. Facilitate blameless root-cause analysis and post-incident improvements . • Automation & Tooling: Develop production-quality automation and tooling for provisioning, validation, and fleet management to continually improve rollout efficiency. • Capacity Planning & Forecasting: Partner with the customer to understand future demand, forecast capacity needs, and proactively identify constraints. • Feedback Loop & Product Influence: Surface real-world operational issues and platform opportunities with Cloudflare's Infrastructure, Hardware, and Product teams to inform future roadmaps. • Strategic Relationship Management: Cultivate trusted technical relationships with senior stakeholders (Staff+ engineers, Directors, and VPs) across both organizations. • On-Site Presence: Spend time regularly on-site at customer offices to foster close communication and partnership with their engineering teams. Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience 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. • Infrastructure & SRE Background: Solid experience in infrastructure engineering, SRE, or production engineering, with a track record of running and scaling large-scale production systems. • Capacity & Fleet Operations: Practical experience bringing server capacity online, encompassing provisioning, imaging, configuration management, and fleet-scale lifecycle management. • Hardware Fluency: Familiarity with server hardware, firmware, BMC/IPMI/Redfish, and diagnostics. Ability to set validation standards, triage issues remote