Escalation Engineer, Zero Trust

Job Location: Austin TX

About the Department

The Customer Support Team solves complicated problems and answers technical inquiries via phone email chat and social media. Whether it is a WordPress blogger using our services for free or a global Enterprise business with petabytes of web traffic our team is always eager to assist. We are the eyes and ears of Cloudflare acting as the real-time voice of the customer to help communicate their needs and real-world use cases back to the rest of the company - to help build a better service and future product development.

Role Summary

The Cloudflare Escalation Engineer is a technical resource within support responsible for owning and resolving the most complex customer escalations. This role partners closely with Technical Support Engineers proactively swarms on challenging cases and provides hands-on guidance to accelerate issue resolution. Escalation Engineers lead deep technical investigations across the full stack isolate and reproduce defects and ensure accurate timely communication throughout the escalation lifecycle. While they collaborate with Engineering and Product teams as needed their primary focus is empowering the support organization improving customer reliability and driving high-quality outcomes for escalated customers. They contribute critical insights document new knowledge and help shape processes and readiness that strengthen the overall support experience.

Role Responsibilities

• Advanced Troubleshooting & Root Cause Analysis
  • Investigate the most complex high-impact customer issues escalated from front-line support (TSEs) and directly raised by customers.
  • Perform deep-dive debugging across the full technology stack application database infrastructure APIs and integrations.
  • Serve as a subject matter expert in supporting Zero Trust technologies such as identity and access management (IAM) secure access service edge (SASE) endpoint security and network segmentation tools.
  • Troubleshoot complex technical issues across a broad set of systems including authentication flows (SSO MFA) policy enforcement and secure application access.
  • Use logs traces diagnostics to identify the underlying cause.
  • Work with Engineering to validate defects create reproducible scenarios and confirm fixes.
  • Provide coverage (shift rotation including possibility of weekends and Pacific Time hours) for technical troubleshooting of escalated issues.

• Cross-Functional Escalation Management
  • Manage escalation lifecycle from intake to closure ensuring technical accuracy and timely communication.
  • Partner with Product and Engineering teams to drive bug fixes or workarounds.
  • Communicate status risk and resolution progress clearly to support leaders and customers (as appropriate).

• Swarming & Collaboration with Support Teams
  • Proactively swarm on critical or complex cases with Technical Support Engineers within their regional or skill-based Pod.
  • Provide real-time guidance and mentoring during troubleshooting.
  • Be an expert engineer in the team help front-line engineers improve their technical depth and escalation readiness.

• Knowledge Creation & Enablement
  • Document new findings diagnostic steps and resolutions in internal knowledge bases.
  • Share insights from escalations to improve product documentation and support training.
  • Contribute to runbooks and automation that help prevent future escalations.

• Readiness & Product Expertise
  • Stay current with new product releases architecture changes and known issues.
  • Participate in engineering syncs or release readiness reviews to represent the support perspective.
  • Serve as a subject matter expert (SME) in one or more technical domains.

Role Requirements (Must-Have Skills)

• Solid understanding of Zero Trust principles and technologies such as:
• Identity and Access Management
• Endpoint Detection & Response
• Network Security / Microsegmentation
• Secure Web Gateway / Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB)

• 3-5 years of technical troubleshooting experience preferably in technical support or system reliability engineering
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills ability to disseminate clear and appropriate information to both business and technical audiences
• Able to manage multiple priorities commitments and projects
• You understand and have previous experience working with Identity and Access Management protocols and technologies (SSO SAML OAuth Federation SCIM etc.)
• You understand and have previous experience supporting and troubleshooting multi-factor mechanisms (TOTP SMS FIDO U2F WebAuth EMAIL Push MFA etc).

Core competencies (Desired skills knowledge and experience)

• Extensive technical support experience
• Expertise in troubleshooting application protocols (L7 - DNS HTTP etc)
• Expertise in troubleshooting network infrastructure (L3/L4)
• Expert with Linux command line tools (curl dig git traceroute mtr)
• Expert at analyzing data using tools like grafana kibana and SQL
• Able to clarify complex technical issues and coordinate efforts to resolve
• Able to identify and share/suggest process improvements
• Demonstrated leadership prior mentoring experience
• Self-motivated self-directed strong relationship building can positively influence the actions of others team player
• Comfortable handling inbound and outbound customer calls

Bonus Points

• You are familiar with Cloudflare Zero Trust products (Zero Trust / Access / Gateway / Tunnel WARP client) and have a site actively using our platform
• You have a solid grasp of problem-solving with command line tools (dig / traceroute / curl / tcpdump)
• Familiarity with troubleshooting Windows macOS and Linux operating systems
• You are familiar with Apache Nginx IIS and other web servers
• You have worked with PostgreSQL MySQL MS SQL or other database servers

What Makes Cloudflare Special

Were not just a highly ambitious large-scale technology company. Were 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 weve equipped more than 2400 journalism and civil society organizations in 111 countries with powerful tools to defend themselves against attacks that would otherwise censor their work technology already used by Cloudflares enterprise customers--at no cost.

Athenian Project: In 2017 we created the Athenian Project to ensure that state and local governments have the highest level of protection and reliability for free so that their constituents have access to election information and voter registration. Since the project weve provided services to more than 425 local government election websites in 33 states.

1.1.1.1: We released 1.1.1.1 to help fix the foundation of the Internet by building a faster more secure and privacy-centric public DNS resolver. This is available publicly for everyone to use - it is the first consumer-focused service Cloudflare has ever released. Heres the deal - we dont store client IP addresses never ever. We will continue to abide by our privacy commitment and ensure that no user data is sold to advertisers or used to target consumers.

Sound like something youd like to be a part of Wed love to hear from you!

This position may require access to information protected under U.S. export control laws including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations. Please note that any offer of employment may be conditioned on your authorization to receive software or technology controlled under these U.S. export laws without sponsorship for an export license.

Cloudflare is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunity for all people and place great value in both diversity and inclusiveness. All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to their or any other persons perceived or actual race color religion sex gender gender identity gender expression sexual orientation national origin ancestry citizenship age physical or mental disability medical condition family care status or any other basis protected by law. We are an AA/Veterans/Disabled Employer.

Cloudflare provides reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities. Please tell us if you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job. Examples of reasonable accommodations include but are not limited to changing the application process providing documents in an alternate format using a sign language interpreter or using specialized equipment. If you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job please contact us via e-mail at or via mail at 101 Townsend St. San Francisco CA 94107.