Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

Hybrid

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.

At Cloudflare, we're not looking for people who wait for a polished roadmap; we're looking for the builders who see the cracks in the Internet that everyone else has simply learned to live with. We value candidates who have the instinct to spot a "normalized" problem and the AI-native curiosity to create a solution using the latest tools. Our culture is built on iteration, leveraging AI to ship faster today to make it better tomorrow, while ensuring that every improvement, no matter how small, is shared across the team to lift everyone up. If you're the type of person who values curiosity over bureaucracy, and that AI is a partner in solving tough problems to keep the Internet moving forward, you'll fit right in.

Available Locations

Austin, Texas, US

About the Role

As an FDE, you'll work as a hands-on, consultative build partner to a portfolio of Cloudflare's most strategic customers — companies building complex, ambitious applications on our developer platform. You'll work shoulder-to-shoulder with their engineering teams to shape architecture, prototype alongside them, review code, and unblock the hard technical problems that stand between them and production — so they can build faster and scale further on Cloudflare.

This is a one-to-many motion. Rather than embedding full-time with a single account, you'll work in parallel, bringing patterns, reference implementations, lessons learned from across your portfolio to every customer you work with. Customers come to us building on the developer platform, but when we engage we support the full breadth of the Cloudflare platform.

You operate as a technical force multiplier — helping customers ship, raising the quality of what they build, and surfacing real-world product insights back to Cloudflare's Product and Engineering teams.

What You'll Do

• Act as the hands-on technical build partner across a portfolio of strategic customers building on the Cloudflare platform, driving each engagement forward from idea to launch.
• Shape scalable, resilient architectures on Cloudflare and guide customers on the design decisions that matter — before they become bottlenecks.
• Hands-on development alongside customer teams to prototype, configure, and build reference implementations that demonstrate the right way to solve a problem on Cloudflare.
• Review customer code and share the best practices that raise the quality, performance, and security of what they build.
• Diagnose and resolve hard technical problems across the stack, removing the blockers between customers and a successful launch.
• Write reference code, samples, and technical guidance that customers can learn from, build on, and reuse.
• Support the full breadth of the Cloudflare platform when engaged — from Workers, storage (KV, R2, D1), and Durable Objects to AI (Workers AI, AI Gateway, Vectorize), security, networking, and observability.
• Join Customer Engineering rituals — design reviews, planning sessions, and technical working sessions.
• Surface real-world edge cases, friction, and product gaps directly to Cloudflare's Product and Engineering teams to shape the product roadmap.
• Establish and maintain trusted technical relationships with customer engineers and technical leaders (Staff+ engineers, Directors, and VPs).
• Identify opportunities to accelerate the adoption of Cloudflare services, unlocking new capabilities across each customer's tech stack.

Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience

• 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 stack—from 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 don't 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.

Bonus Points

• 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 partner's codebase.
• A visible public profile, including open-source contributions, technical blogging, or speaking engagements at industry conferences.

Compensation

Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.

Equity

This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare's equity plan.

Benefits

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

• 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

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