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.

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 AI-assisted diagnostics, agents, and tooling.