Senior Customer Reliability Engineer

Responsibilities

• Rapid incident response and root cause analysis: Own the most complex, high-severity customer issues end-to-end, from first signal through confirmed resolution. Lead deep-dive debugging across the full stack: edge, network, DNS, transport, APIs, application, customer-side configuration. Reproduce defects, validate fixes with Engineering, and confirm customer-side resolution. Produce postmortems other engineers rely on. Hold on-call for high-severity incidents as part of a global rotation that includes weekends.
• Proactive reliability engineering: Analyze support and telemetry signals across the customer base to find systemic risks before they become incidents. Contribute monitoring, detection, and diagnostic capability to the core product and the engineering systems that give Customer Support early visibility into customer-affecting issues. Define customer-facing reliability metrics (error rates, resolution times, repeat-contact rates) and drive measurable improvement. Write automation that reduces mean-time-to-detect and mean-time-to-resolve.
• Cross-functional partnership: Manage the technical escalation lifecycle with clear ownership and timely communication. Partner with Product Engineering to drive fixes, workarounds, and configuration changes that address underlying gaps. Represent the customer reliability perspective in engineering syncs, incident reviews, and post-mortem processes.
• Technical leadership and enablement: Raise the technical floor of Customer Support through pair-debugging, structured knowledge transfer, and shared tooling. Document diagnostic procedures and resolution patterns in runbooks, internal knowledge bases, and AI skills. Share insights from customer-facing incidents to improve product documentation and operational readiness.
• Product and platform depth: Maintain deep, current expertise across Cloudflare's product portfolio: edge networking, DNS, CDN, WAF, DDoS mitigation, Zero Trust, Workers, and our developer platform. Anticipate customer impact from new releases and architecture changes. Serve as a go-to subject-matter expert in one or more domains.

What You Might Work On

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 (OSI model, IPv4/IPv6 addressing, subnetting, routing, switching), core protocols (DNS, HTTP/S, TLS/SSL, SMTP, SNMP, NTP), routing protocols (BGP, OSPF), firewall concepts, VPN and encryption, Zero Trust architecture.
• Proficiency with observability and diagnostic tooling: packet capture and analysis (Wireshark, tcpdump), log aggregation (Kibana, Elasticsearch), metrics dashboards (Grafana), distributed tracing.
• Strong scripting and automation skills (Bash, Python) with a track record of shipping tooling that improves reliability and reduces toil.
• 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.

Desired Skills & Experience

• SRE, DevOps, or platform engineering experience with direct customer-facing accountability.
• 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.
• Data-at-scale analysis using SQL, PromQL, or equivalent.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi), and container orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker).
• 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.

Bonus Points

• 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.
• Chaos engineering or formal reliability frameworks (e.g., Google SRE principles).
• Managing or configuring non-HTTP services: email, DNS authoritative/recursive, FTP, SSH.