Customer Reliability Engineer

The role

CRE is a rapid response team and a proactive engineering team. You fix things at the edge as they come up, and you help build the product capabilities that identify customer issues before they become a crisis. Both modes are equally core.

Rapid response. When a customer issue surfaces that is high-severity, cross-layer and complex, you are the engineer who answers. You reproduce the defect, isolate the root cause across Cloudflare's infrastructure and the customer's stack, drive the fix with Product Engineering, and confirm resolution. You hold on-call for high-severity incidents as part of a global shift rotation.

Proactive engineering. When no fire is burning, you work with Product Engineering and our platform teams to build the capabilities that make the next fire cheaper or unnecessary: telemetry pipelines that correlate signals across the customer base, detectors that fire before a human notices, diagnostic tooling that scales across hundreds of customers, automation that reduces toil for Customer Support. Every incident you carry generates engineering output that reduces the cost of recurrence. The work compounds.

All jobs

Customer Reliability Engineer

Cloudflare, Hybrid +1

The role

What you will do

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.

Nice to have

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.

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.

Customer Reliability Engineer

The role

Customer Reliability Engineer

The role

What you will do

What you need

Nice to have

Desired Skills & Experience

Bonus Points

Why This Role Exists

Rapid response

Proactive engineering

About Cloudflare

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