Model Operations Lead, AI Gateway

Cloudflare ·United States, Austin, TX / New York, NY / San Francisco, CA

On-site Full-time Senior Operations

Job Description

About Us

At Cloudflare, we are on a mission to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world’s largest networks that powers millions of websites and other Internet properties for customers ranging from individual bloggers to SMBs to Fortune 500 companies. Cloudflare protects and accelerates any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. Internet properties powered by Cloudflare all have web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with every request. As a result, they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. Cloudflare was named to Entrepreneur Magazine’s Top Company Cultures list and ranked among the World’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company.

Available Locations: Austin, TX | New York City, NY | San Francisco, CA

About AI Gateway

AI inference is becoming core infrastructure. Every serious application will need access to many models across many providers, with reliability, observability, security, cost control, and routing built in from the start. AI Gateway is Cloudflare’s bet that this layer belongs at the network edge: close to users, close to compute, and simple enough that a developer can adopt it with one API change.

Developers using AI Gateway need answers to two questions. Is the model I’m calling working the way you say it does? And which model should I be using at all? You’ll lead the models team that answers both.

You’ll start with model operations. That’s the work behind every model in the catalog: provider integrations, capability testing, pricing and metering, capacity, security reviews, docs, health, and deprecations. Sometimes a launch needs to go live within minutes of a lab’s announcement. Sometimes the right call is to hold it. Cloudflare is an infrastructure company at heart, so reliability and accuracy come first; speed comes from preparation and automation.

Then you’ll bring model intelligence online. That means turning what we learn from Gateway traffic into decisions for customers: capability maps, per-task rankings, auto-routing profiles that pick the right model for each request, evals and regression detection, and market intelligence developers can trust.

This is a people-management role reporting to the AI Gateway Engineering Manager. You’ll hire, develop, and lead the team, and you’ll stay hands‑on: writing code, building agent-driven workflows, and getting into the details of a failed launch or a suspicious eval SLO. Expect to manage people, projects, model stock, and operations all at once.

About the Role

• Build and lead the models team: Hire, coach, and grow the people who run the catalog today and build its intelligence over time. Give people real ownership, give direct feedback, and grow leads who can run their own areas.
• Run model launches end-to-end: Scope integrations, coordinate testing and evals, confirm pricing, metering, capacity, and security, and get docs and announcements ready. Prepare day-zero launches in advance so they can ship in minutes.
• Keep the catalog true: Make sure what we publish (capabilities, limits, versions, prices) matches what developers actually get. Catch silent regressions, such as broken tool calling, truncated streams, quantization changes, or usage and pricing mismatches, before customers do.
• Build model intelligence: As it comes online, own the evals, capability maps, and per-task rankings behind our auto-routing profiles and model recommendations. Make sure they measure what they claim to, and connect regressions to routing decisions so customers who chose “auto” aren’t the ones who discover a problem.
• Treat the catalog and intelligence as products: Have a point of view on which models belong in the catalog, which routing profiles to ship, and what market intelligence to publish. Base it on usage, quality, reliability, and cost data. Turn what you learn into roadmap input.
• Run a lightweight operating cadence: Keep one source of truth for what’s in flight, who owns it, what’s blocked, and what ships next. Keep Engineering, Product, Partnerships, and other stakeholders aligned and informed without status meetings.
• Automate relentlessly: Turn repeatable steps into scripts, tools, and agent workflows: endpoint validation, eval runs, catalog and pricing reconciliation, regression detection, and provider follow‑ups. Manual effort per launch should fall as the catalog grows.

Responsibilities

• Day-Zero & Quality Launches: Ensure new models launch on day zero with tested capabilities, accurate pricing, docs, and a clear call on routing eligibility.
• Catalog Reliability & Health: Ensure the catalog reflects reality, and proactively identify when a model or provider is underperforming before customers notice.
• Auto-Routing & Optimization: Deliver auto-routing that measurably beats a fixed model choice on cost or quality for users.
• Developer Trust & Methodology: Build and maintain trusted rankings and recommendations grounded in solid methodology.
• Partner & Stakeholder Management: Set clear expectations for providers, while keeping Engineering, Product, Partnerships, and other stakeholders aligned.
• Team Leadership & Growth: Provide clear ownership and direction so the team knows what’s next, who owns it, and how to grow into bigger roles.
• Operational Scalability: Continually drive down the human effort required for each launch, eval, and routing update through tools and automation.

Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience

• People Leadership: Experience hiring, managing, and growing engineers or operators, giving direct feedback, delegating real ownership, and expanding scope without becoming a bottleneck.
• Technical & Shipping Capabilities: Proven track record of taking technical launches or integrations from ambiguity to production across teams and partners. Hands‑on ability to write TypeScript, Python, or Rust, read API docs, inspect endpoints, and debug using terminal tools (logs, cURL).
• Model Ecosystem Expertise: Deep familiarity with new models, labs, and inference providers. Hands‑on understanding of streaming, tool calling, structured outputs, rate limits, token pricing, and provider‑specific model behavior variations.
• Product & SRE Mindset: Data‑driven product instincts to advocate for adding, modifying, or retiring catalog items. SRE approach to defining, measuring, and alerting on service health, managing incidents calmly, and fixing root causes.
• Agent Workflows & Detail‑Oriented Execution: Daily experience building with agents‑scoping work, verifying outputs, and integrating deterministic checks or human judgment appropriately. Meticulous attention to detail regarding model IDs, context limits, per‑token prices, and response fields.

Bonus Qualifications (Nice to Have):

• Experience at an inference provider, model lab, model router, eval platform, or API company.
• Background in evals, ranking/recommendation systems, observability, metering, or usage-based billing.
• Familiarity with Cloudflare Workers, AI Gateway, Workers AI, or Replicate.
• Relevant domain backgrounds in engineering management, SRE, partner engineering, evals/applied ML, technical program management, or solutions engineering.

Compensation

Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.

• For Bay Area based hires: Estimated annual salary of $230,000 – $317,000
• For New York City, New Jersey, Washington, Washington DC, and California (excluding Bay Area) based hires: Estimated annual salary of $275,000 – $303,000

Equity

This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare’s 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.

Health & Welfare Benefits

Time Off

What Makes Cloudflare Special?

We’re not just a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company. We’re 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, we’ve equipped more than 2,400 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 Cloudflare’s 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, we’ve 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. Here’s the deal – we don’t 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 you’d like to be a part of? We’d 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 person’s, 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 View email address on click.appcast.io or via mail at 101 Townsend St. San Francisco, CA 94107.