Principal Partner Engineer, Japan (Based in Tokyo)

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 Location: Tokyo, Japan Role Overview The Partner Engineer (PE) is a high-impact, strategic technical sales leader responsible for end-to-end technical lifecycle and enablement of the assigned partners, managing both pre-sales and post-sales engineering activities. In this role, you will act as the single technical point of contact as the trusted advisory for your assigned partners, driving technical validation during the sales cycle, architecting their delivery readiness and ensuring ongoing Partner Success. The role focuses heavily on driving value-based solution selling to accelerate the adoption of Cloudflare platform with focus on Cloudflare One (SASE/SSE) and AI Infrastructure (Workers AI / AI Gateway). By cultivating deeply technical champions within the partner organization, aligning architectures to tangible business outcomes, optimizing post-sales delivery and building joint managed services offering, you will directly expand and influence the pipeline to maximize Partner-Influenced Opportunity (PIO) revenue. Key Responsibilities 1. Pre-Sales Engineering & Champion Building • Technical Alignment, Discovery & Enablement: Own the technical relationship with Partners to align on building joint Go-To-Market (GTM) strategies. Align, build, and accelerate partner technical capabilities, enabling them to lead deep technical discovery and architectural design to independently sell scalable solutions leveraging the Cloudflare Platform with a strong focus on AI and Cloudflare One (CF1). • Technical Account Plan Ownership: Own and drive the end-to-end Technical Account Plan (TAP) for assigned strategic partners. Act as the primary architect mapping partner business goals to technical execution milestones, ensuring continuous alignment on CF1 and AI adoption targets. • Building Technical Champions: Identify, enable, and cultivate key technical advocates and "Champions" within the partner organization to scale Cloudflare expertise independently, generate Partner-Influenced Opportunities (PIO), and empower them to deliver high-value professional services around Zero Trust and AI application security. • Driving PIO via Next-Gen Architectures: Collaborate with sales teams to proactively source, qualify, and expand PIO through strategic architectural alignment, focusing on migrating legacy network architectures to CF1 and integrating secure AI solutions. • Deal Support & Qualification: Enable partners' technical validation, proof-of-concept (PoC), demo, pipeline generation, and pipeline acceleration capabilities. Identify joint pursuit accounts, facilitate strategic technical account planning, and deliver cutting-edge solution architecture sessions for Named Partners 2. Accelerate Services Delivery • ASD Partner Journey Ownership: Own the ASD partner journey to ensure partners possess the advanced capabilities required to deploy, manage, and support the Cloudflare platform and AI application workloads seamlessly. • Joint Services Offering Acceleration with strong focus on CF1 and A1: Build and co-develop joint services catalogues with key partners, accelerating the creation and launch of their own Cloudflare-focused services offerings, managed CF1 SASE practices, and AI security assessments. • Service Monetization & Performance Metrics: Enable partners to embed CF1 and Workers AI capabilities into their own managed security portfolios to shorten time-to-market, protect client AI pipelines, and maximize profitability. Develop, manage, and track key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure and improve the effectiveness of these partner service deliveries • Technical Account Management & Architectural Health: Act as the escalated technical point of contact to ensure long-term architectural health, utilizing telemetry and proactive design to move the partner relationship from reactive to strategics for Cloudflare. 3. Automation AI Agents & Continuous Innovation • Leverage Autonomous AI Tools: Champion the use of Cloudflare OS and AI tools (Agent PAT and Agent Echo) to automate standard, repeatable technical tasks, optimizing operational efficiency and freeing up bandwidth for high-touch, strategic partner engagements.AI & CF1 • Product Enhancement Feedback Loop: Engage partner champions in the Partner Technical Advisory Council (PTAC) to give them early access to beta software, capture raw product feedback, and drive joint co-innovation on CF1 features an