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About the Role
About Cloudflare
At Cloudflare, we are on a mission to help build a better Internet. Today, Cloudflare operates one of the world's largest global networks, protecting and accelerating millions of web properties ranging from individual developers to Fortune 500 enterprises—all without requiring custom hardware or software modifications. Traffic routed through our intelligent edge network grows smarter with every request, enhancing performance while shielding applications against malicious traffic and sophisticated attacks.
We value builders who identify the hidden flaws in Internet infrastructure and take action. Our engineering culture thrives on curiosity, continuous iteration, and an AI-native approach to solving systemic problems rapidly. Rather than relying on rigid roadmaps, our teams leverage cutting-edge tools and shared knowledge to continuously elevate the reliability of the global web.
Why This Role Exists
Cloudflare has evolved into critical global infrastructure. Financial institutions power payment rails, public sector entities manage civic services, media networks stream live broadcasts, and healthcare organizations deliver patient care on top of our network. At this scale, reliability is not merely a product feature—it is a core mission.
High-stakes environments demand an advanced operating model. Merely routing tickets or shipping isolated product features is insufficient. The Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) organization represents SRE principles applied directly outward to our customer base. CREs act as the spine of this pivot, owning critical cross-layer customer problems at the edge and bringing those insights directly back into core Product Engineering.
The Role: Customer Reliability Engineer
As a Customer Reliability Engineer, you will balance two equally essential mandates: rapid response and proactive engineering.
Rapid Response: When cross-layer, high-severity defects emerge, you are the engineer driving resolution. You will reproduce complex issues across Cloudflare infrastructure and customer environments, isolate root causes, drive code or configuration fixes alongside Product Engineering, and participate in a global on-call rotation for Sev-1 incidents.
Proactive Engineering: In between active incidents, you will design and ship systems that prevent future failures. This includes building cross-stack telemetry pipelines, early detection tools, diagnostic automation, and AI-assisted triage agents that identify anomalies long before a customer experiences service degradation.
What You Might Work On
- Edge Latency Isolation: Investigate a Sev-1 incident for an enterprise financial client experiencing asymmetric latency at a specific Point of Presence (POP), tracing packet flows through BGP routing and origin setups to issue an upstream fix.
- Protocol Triage: Resolve deep-seated application issues, such as isolating persistent WebSocket disconnects between edge Web Application Firewalls (WAF) and customer origin load balancers.
- Live Event Engineering: Direct-partner with government or media SRE teams during active DDoS attacks to optimize Magic Transit and WAF rulesets in real time.
- AI & Telemetry Tooling: Prototype and deploy internal AI diagnostic agents that parse incoming incident reports, query distributed logs, and automatically generate root-cause hypotheses backed by cited evidence.
Impact & Cultural Mission
Cloudflare is deeply committed to protecting the open web through initiative projects such as Project Galileo (protecting free speech and civil society organizations), the Athenian Project (securing state and local election infrastructure), and 1.1.1.1 (a privacy-first public DNS resolver). Working at Cloudflare means contributing to infrastructure that supports and secures vital global services every single day.
Key Technical Responsibilities
- check_circle Own complex, high-severity customer issues end-to-end, conducting full-stack debugging across edge infrastructure, network protocols, DNS, APIs, and application code.
- check_circle Participate in a global on-call rotation to support high-severity customer incidents, including weekend shifts.
- check_circle Reproduce obscure defects, partner with Product Engineering to validate upstream fixes, and confirm successful customer resolution.
- check_circle Analyze telemetry and support signals across the global customer base to identify systemic risks and build proactive detectors.
- check_circle Define, monitor, and improve key customer reliability metrics, including error rates, mean-time-to-detect (MTTD), and mean-time-to-resolve (MTTR).
- check_circle Develop automation, diagnostic tools, and AI agents that pre-diagnose incidents and streamline support operations.
- check_circle Conduct thorough postmortems and technical escalation reviews to prevent recurrence of critical failure modes.
- check_circle Elevate internal technical capabilities across Customer Support through pair-debugging, runbook authoring, and knowledge transfer.
- check_circle Maintain deep technical mastery across Cloudflare's platform, including Workers, Zero Trust, WAF, CDN, DNS, and DDoS mitigation suites.
Prerequisites & Qualifications
- check Minimum 5 years of hands-on experience in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), escalation engineering, systems engineering, or technical operations, with at least 2 years in customer-facing technical environments.
- check Solid foundation in networking protocols and concepts: TCP/IP, IPv4/IPv6, BGP, OSPF, DNS, HTTP/S, TLS/SSL, stateful/stateless firewalls, NAT, ACLs, and IPSec/GRE tunnels.
- check Hands-on expertise with diagnostic and observability tooling, such as Wireshark, tcpdump, Kibana, Elasticsearch, Grafana, and distributed tracing systems.
- check Proficiency in scripting and automation using Python or Bash to reduce operational toil.
- check Demonstrated experience with incident management frameworks, SLO/SLI reliability practices, and blameless postmortem culture.
- check Strong technical communication skills with composure under pressure when leading incident bridges with enterprise technical leads.
- check Preferred: Direct experience with Linux diagnostic utilities (curl, dig, traceroute, mtr, strace, ss) and SQL/PromQL data analysis.
- check Preferred: Knowledge of infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi), container orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker), multi-cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), or Cloudflare platform products (Workers, Pages, R2, D1).
About Cloudflare Greenhouse Board
Verified hiring organization details.
Cloudflare is a technology company that provides web infrastructure, security, content delivery network services, and DDoS mitigation. Operating via a hybrid work model, the organization manages its career opportunities and applicant tracking through the Greenhouse recruitment platform.