Senior Customer Reliability Engineer

About the role

Cloudflare built its reputation helping build a better Internet, defending millions of sites, giving away SSL and DDoS mitigation when the industry charged premium prices. In an acceleratingly dangerous world, the scope of that mission has changed. We are becoming something more: critical infrastructure. Banks run their payment rails on us. Governments run public services on us. Media companies depend on us during live events. Health systems depend on us to provide care. Reliability for these customers is no longer a feature of our product. It is a mission.

This is work a central dev team cannot do from the inside of the network. The Customer Reliability Engineering function is the spine of that pivot. CRE is SRE applied outward, the same engineering discipline, applied to the reliability of the systems our customers run on Cloudflare. You are the engineer who owns the problems that matter most to the customers who matter most, and you contribute directly to our products and tooling, in partnership with Product Engineering, to hold that standard across the entire customer base.

Responsibilities

• Rapid response: Own a Sev-1 incident where a large financial services customer sees asymmetric latency from a single POP. Trace it through BGP routing and origin configuration. Produce the fix upstream.
• Diagnose a recurring WebSocket disconnect that a media customer has been fighting for weeks. Isolate it to a specific interaction between WAF and their origin load balancer. Drive the fix with Product Engineering.
• Partner with a government customer's SRE team during an active DDoS event. Help them shape their Magic Transit and WAF configuration in real time.
• Proactive engineering: Build, with Product Engineering, a distributed tracing capability that correlates Cloudflare edge signals with customer origin metrics so a single query tells the story of a failing request end-to-end.
• Ship a detector for a class of WAF false positives silently degrading several customers. Get it into production before the next renewal cycle.
• Prototype an AI agent that takes a new customer case, pulls relevant logs and config, and proposes a root cause with linked evidence. Deploy it internally. Measure whether it makes engineers faster. Iterate.

Requirements

• Minimum 5 years of hands-on experience in site reliability engineering, escalation engineering, systems engineering, or a comparable deeply technical support / operations role, with at least 2 years in customer-facing environments.
• Strong foundation in networking and security: TCP/IP fundamentals, Core protocols, Routing protocols, Firewall concepts, Zero Trust architecture, data-at-scale analysis, CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, Chaos engineering, formal reliability frameworks, managing or configuring non-HTTP services.
• Experience with incident management, postmortem culture, and SLO/SLI-based reliability practices.
• Excellent written and verbal communication. Able to convey complex technical information clearly to engineers, leadership, and customers.
• Comfort owning ambiguous, cross-layer problems. Composure under pressure during high-severity incidents.
• Deep expertise at both L3/L4 (network infrastructure) and L7 (application protocols, DNS, HTTP, WebSocket).
• Expert-level proficiency with Linux command-line tools: curl, dig, git, traceroute, mtr, strace, ss.
• Track record of building internal tooling or diagnostic utilities that measurably improved team efficiency.
• Demonstrated technical leadership: mentoring engineers, driving cross-team initiatives, influencing outcomes without direct authority.
• Experience applying AI/ML to production engineering or operational workflows.
• Comfort engaging directly with enterprise customer engineering teams, including on calls during incidents.

Qualifications

• Active Cloudflare user who understands the platform as a practitioner.
• Hands-on experience with Workers, Pages, R2, D1, or other developer platform services.
• Cloud networking and security experience across AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Web programming (HTML, JavaScript) and regular expressions.
• Bonus points for chaos engineering or formal reliability frameworks (e.g., Google SRE principles).
• Managing or configuring non-HTTP services: email, DNS authoritative/recursive, FTP, SSH.

Skills

• Strong scripting and automation skills (Bash, Python) with a track record of shipping tooling that improves reliability and reduces toil.
• Experience with observability and diagnostic tooling: packet capture and analysis, log aggregation, metrics dashboards, distributed tracing.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi), and container orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker).
• Experience with health insurance plans, including medical, dental, vision, and flexible spending accounts.
• Experience with employee stock purchase plans and retirement savings plans.

Benefits

• Health & Welfare Benefits: 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.
• Financial Benefits: Short and Long Term Disability Insurance, Life & Accident Insurance, 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan, Employee Stock Participation Plan.
• Time Off: Flexible paid time off covering vacation and sick leave, Leave programs, including parental, pregnancy health, medical, and bereavement leave.