Senior Forward Deployed Engineer – DevOps

Cloudflare

. Lead bringing new compute capacity online for strategic customers through planning, provisioning, validation, and production handover .

Posted 10/7/2026full-timeSan Francisco • California • United StatesSenior💰 $194,000 - $266,000 per yearWebsite

Core Competencies

Role fit

Core Competencies

Use this summary to align your resume positioning with the role.

Demonstrates expertise in infrastructure engineering and production systems management, with a strong focus on provisioning, validation, and operational excellence. Proficient in automation, monitoring, and cross-team collaboration to ensure reliable and scalable infrastructure solutions.

Highest-signal resume keywords

Infrastructure EngineeringProduction Systems ManagementAutomation DevelopmentLinux Systems ProficiencyConfiguration Management

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills

Infrastructure EngineeringProduction EngineeringServer ProvisioningConfiguration ManagementLinux SystemsGo ProgrammingPython ProgrammingTerraformAnsibleKubernetes

Soft Skills

Technical CommunicationCross-Team CollaborationStrategic Technical DiscussionsProblem SolvingRoot-Cause Analysis

Tools & Technologies

PrometheusGrafanaClickHouseBMC/IPMI/RedfishMonitoring FrameworksFleet Management ToolsCloudflare Platform

Industry Keywords

Data Center OperationsSREIncident ResponseCapacity PlanningHyperscaler Experience

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

AnsibleCloudDNSGrafanaKubernetesLinuxPrometheusPythonRustSaltStackTCP/IPTerraformGo

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Lead bringing new compute capacity online for strategic customers through planning, provisioning, validation, and production handover
Define acceptance criteria and validation workflows, including burn-in, benchmarking, and health checks across compute, storage, and networking
Work with on-site data center teams to execute checks and resolve issues
Champion build, configuration, security, and observability standards before capacity launches
Establish comprehensive monitoring, alerting, and runbooks for production systems
Coordinate Cloudflare infrastructure, hardware engineering, data center operations, supply chain, network teams, and customer engineering teams
Serve as the primary technical contact for customer infrastructure and guide account strategy and technical direction
Participate in standups, capacity reviews, change management, and incident response
Facilitate blameless root-cause analysis and post-incident improvements
Develop production-quality automation and tooling for provisioning, validation, and fleet management
Forecast capacity needs and proactively identify constraints with customers
Surface operational issues and platform opportunities to Infrastructure, Hardware, and Product teams
Build trusted technical relationships with Staff+ engineers, Directors, and VPs across both organizations
Spend time regularly on-site at customer offices

Requirements

What you’ll need

Solid experience in infrastructure engineering, SRE, or production engineering, with a track record of running and scaling large-scale production systems
Practical experience bringing server capacity online, including provisioning, imaging, configuration management, and fleet-scale lifecycle management
Familiarity with server hardware, firmware, BMC/IPMI/Redfish, and diagnostics
Ability to set validation standards, triage issues remotely, and partner with on-site technicians
Strong understanding of Linux systems and core networking principles, including TCP/IP, BGP, DNS, load balancing, and data center topologies
Proficiency in Go, Python, or Rust
Experience with infrastructure-as-code and configuration management tools such as Terraform, Ansible, or Salt
Experience supporting mission-critical services, including on-call rotations, incident response, SLO management, and reliability engineering
Familiarity with monitoring, metrics, and logging frameworks such as Prometheus, Grafana, or ClickHouse
Exposure to Kubernetes or similar platforms and workload scheduling
Interest or experience in leveraging modern AI tools for automation, debugging, and documentation
Ability to coordinate complex, multi-team delivery efforts across regions and time zones
Ability to engage in strategic technical discussions with executive-level stakeholders
Prior experience at a hyperscaler, cloud provider, or large-scale data center environment is a bonus
Familiarity with Cloudflare's platform and network architecture is a bonus
Experience in customer-embedded or partner-facing technical infrastructure roles is a bonus
Technical writing, internal mentorship, open-source contributions, or community presentations are bonus experience
Applicants may need authorization to receive software or technology controlled under U.S. export laws without sponsorship for an export license

Benefits

Comp & perks

Equity plan participation
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