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Senior Forward Deployed Infrastructure Engineer

Cloudflare· Developer Relations
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Hybrid (Austin, San Francisco)$194k - $266k + equityfull-timePosted 1w ago

About the role

Senior Forward Deployed Infrastructure Engineer at Cloudflare, embedded with a strategic customer to ensure modern cloud compute capacity is available, reliable, and ready when needed. Hybrid role with on-site presence, coordinating across Cloudflare infrastructure, hardware, data center, supply chain, and the customer’s engineering teams to drive capacity onboarding, validation, and production readiness.

Responsibilities

  • Capacity Onboarding & Delivery: Lead bringing new compute capacity online for the customer, collaborating on planning, provisioning, validation, and handover to production. Drive turn-ups that are predictable, efficient, and repeatable.
  • Hardware & Spec Validation: Partner with teams to ensure delivered systems meet agreed specifications. Define acceptance criteria and validation workflows, including burn-in, benchmarking, and health checks across compute, storage, and networking. Work alongside on-site data center teams to execute checks and resolve issues.
  • Standards & Operational Readiness: Champion Cloudflare's build, configuration, security, and observability standards prior to capacity launch. Ensure comprehensive monitoring, alerting, and runbooks are established for all production systems.
  • Cross-Team Alignment: Act as the central point of collaboration between Cloudflare's infrastructure, hardware engineering, data center operations, supply chain, and network teams, alongside the customer's engineering group.
  • Technical Accountability: Serve as the primary technical point of contact for the customer's infrastructure, guiding account strategy and technical direction for supporting Cloudflare resources.
  • Reliability & Incident Response: Engage in operational rhythms with the customer and Cloudflare, including standups, capacity reviews, change management, and incident response. Facilitate blameless root-cause analysis and post-incident improvements.
  • Automation & Tooling: Develop production-quality automation and tooling for provisioning, validation, and fleet management to continually improve rollout efficiency.
  • Capacity Planning & Forecasting: Partner with the customer to understand future demand, forecast capacity needs, and proactively identify constraints.
  • Feedback Loop & Product Influence: Surface real-world operational issues and platform opportunities with Cloudflare's Infrastructure, Hardware, and Product teams to inform future roadmaps.
  • Strategic Relationship Management: Cultivate trusted technical relationships with senior stakeholders across both organizations.
  • On-Site Presence: Spend time regularly on-site at customer offices to foster close communication and partnership with their engineering teams.

Qualifications

  • Infrastructure & SRE Background: Solid experience in infrastructure engineering, SRE, or production engineering, with a track record of running and scaling large-scale production systems.
  • Capacity & Fleet Operations: Practical experience bringing server capacity online, encompassing provisioning, imaging, configuration management, and fleet-scale lifecycle management.
  • Hardware Fluency: Familiarity with server hardware, firmware, BMC/IPMI/Redfish, and diagnostics. Ability to set validation standards, triage issues remotely, and partner with on-site technicians. Experience with GPUs or specialized accelerators is a plus.
  • Linux & Networking: Strong understanding of Linux systems and core networking principles (TCP/IP, BGP, DNS, load balancing, and data center topologies).
  • Automation & Development: Proficiency in Go, Python, or Rust, plus experience using infrastructure-as-code and configuration management tools (e.g., Terraform, Ansible, Salt).
  • Production Ownership: Experience supporting mission-critical services, including on-call rotations, incident response, SLO management, and reliability engineering.
  • Observability: Familiarity with monitoring, metrics, and logging frameworks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ClickHouse).
  • Containers & Orchestration: Exposure to Kubernetes or similar platforms and workload scheduling on newly provisioned capacity.
  • AI-Augmented Workflows: Interest or experience in leveraging modern AI tools to streamline automation, debugging, and documentation.
  • Program-Level Coordination: Ability to coordinate complex, multi-team delivery across regions and time zones.
  • Proactive Problem-Solving: Self-motivated in identifying bottlenecks and implementing durable fixes.
  • Stakeholder Communication: Ability to engage in strategic technical discussions with executive-level stakeholders.

Skills

Required:Infrastructure engineeringCapacity onboarding and fleet managementHardware validation and diagnosticsLinux & NetworkingAutomation & IaCProduction ownership & incident responseObservabilityKubernetes / Containers

Benefits

  • Health & Welfare Benefits: Medical/Rx, Dental, Vision, Flexible Spending Accounts, Commuter Spending Accounts, Fertility & Family Forming Benefits, mental health support, Global Travel Medical Insurance.
  • Financial Benefits: Short and Long Term Disability, Life & Accident Insurance, 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan, Employee Stock Participation Plan.
  • Time Off: Flexible paid time off, parental/pregnancy/medical/bereavement leave.
Last updated Oct 14, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

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