Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

• San Francisco US

Cloudflares SeniorForward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) operate at the intersection of product engineering and customer impact.

As an FDE you will be embedded within one of Cloudflares most strategic global customers working side-by-side with their engineering teams to build and deploy solutions using Cloudflares platform. Unlike traditional Solutions Architects or consultants you will write production code shape technical architecture and directly influence how Cloudflare products are used at massive scale.

You will operate as a technical extension of both organizations - helping the customer ship faster while surfacing real-world product insights back to Cloudflare engineering.

This role is ideal for engineers who want to:

• Stay deeply technical
• Work on real production systems
• Influence product direction
• Build long-term partnerships with world-class engineering teams
• Deep Technical Embedding: Serve as the dedicated long-term technical partner within a strategic customers engineering organization operating as a trusted extension of their team.
• Production-Level Engineering: Design build and deploy production-ready code and configurations directly into customer infrastructure using the Cloudflare platform.
• Technical Accountability: Own the accounts technical success across the entire Cloudflare portfolio. Serve as the primary technical point of contact with other Cloudflare technical resources taking direction from your technical strategy for the account.
• Operational Integration: Participate in customer engineering rituals including daily standups design reviews and real-time incident response.
• Platform Advocacy & Adoption: Identify opportunities to accelerate the adoption of Cloudflare services unlocking new capabilities across the customers tech stack.
• Platform Breadth & Depth: Deep technical competence in building production applications on a modern stack combined with the willingness and ability to go deep on all Cloudflare product areas. From Workers to security networking and observability.
• Feedback Loop & Product Influence: Surface real-world edge cases and product gaps directly to Cloudflares Product and Engineering teams to influence the developer platform roadmap.
• Strategic Relationship Management: Establish and maintain trusted technical relationships with senior leadership (Staff engineers Directors and VPs).
• On-Site Presence: Maintain a regular on-site presence at customer locations to foster deep collaboration and cultural alignment.

• Proven Engineering Pedigree: 7 years of professional software engineering experience. You are a builder at heart with a track record of delivering production-grade systems not just advising on them.
• Production Ownership & Operational Maturity: You have owned mission-critical services with real-world users. You understand the gravity of on-call rotations the urgency of incident response and the architectural rigor required to maintain five nines uptime.
• Active Practitioner: You are currently in the IDE. You have a ship-first mentality and maintain a high velocity staying current with modern frameworks languages and deployment patterns.
• Full-Stack Architectural Depth: Broad technical fluency across the entire stackfrom frontend performance and backend logic to database optimization and distributed infrastructure.
• AI-Native Development: You have integrated AI-augmented workflows (e.g. Windsurf OpenCode) into your daily development cycle to accelerate prototyping and delivery.
• Systems Design & Strategic Thinking: Ability to decompose complex business requirements into scalable resilient technical architectures. You can visualize the big picture without losing sight of the implementation details.
• Cloud Ecosystem Fluency: Deep experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS GCP or Azure) including an understanding of serverless networking and security primitives.
• High Agency & Navigating Ambiguity: You are a self-starter who thrives in zero-to-one environments. You dont wait for a ticket; you identify the problem and own the solution from end-to-end.
• Executive Presence: Comfortable engaging in high-stakes technical and strategic discussions with VP-level stakeholders with the ability to translate complex engineering trade-offs into business impact.

• Direct experience building on Cloudflare Workers or the broader Cloudflare Developer Platform.
• Previous experience at a fast-paced startup or in a customer-facing engineering role where you operated directly within a partners codebase.
• A visible public profile including open-source contributions technical blogging or speaking engagements at industry conferences.

Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.

• For Bay Area based hires: Estimated annual salary of $194000 - $266000.

This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflares equity plan.

Cloudflare offers a complete package of benefits and programs to support you and your family. Our benefits programs can help you pay health care expenses support caregiving build capital for the future and make life a little easier and fun! The below is a description of our benefits for employees in the United States and benefits may vary for employees based outside the U.S.

• Medical/Rx Insurance
• Dental Insurance
• Vision Insurance
• Flexible Spending Accounts
• Commuter Spending Accounts
• Fertility & Family Forming Benefits
• On-demand mental health support and Employee Assistance Program
• Global Travel Medical Insurance

• Short and Long Term Disability Insurance
• Life & Accident Insurance
• 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan
• Employee Stock Participation Plan

• Flexible paid time off covering vacation and sick leave
• Leave programs including parental pregnancy health medical and bereavement leave

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!

Please note that applicants who progress to the offer stage of the interview process may be asked to attend an in-person interview within one of the Cloudflare Offices or Cloudflare Hubs. More details about this will be available at that stage of the interview process.

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.