Engineering Manager, Data Center Operations

About the Department

Infrastructure Operations builds and manages the data center infrastructure behind Cloudflare's global network. The organization brings together engineering, operations, hardware and logistics teams that plan, deploy, operate and maintain our footprint in hundreds of cities worldwide. In this role, you'll help extend that footprint with a new generation of data center sites across the United States.

About the Role

We're looking for an experienced Data Center Operations manager to build and run the team that brings these new sites online and keeps them running around the clock.

You will build a distributed team of Data Center Engineers from the ground up. You'll own sites across their full lifecycle: delivering greenfield builds through third-party vendors and colocation partners, running them in production, and retiring hardware securely at end of life. You'll be accountable for production hardware availability, 24x7 on-site response, and the operating model that lets this footprint scale.

The role means balancing competing demands every day: build deadlines against build quality, dependence on partners against high standards, and fast incident response against careful compliance. You need to keep both sides of each in view.

This role covers the physical layer: hardware, cabling, and Layer 1/Layer 2 connectivity. It works closely with network engineering and server provisioning teams but does not own them.

What You'll Do

Team Leadership

• Hire, develop and manage Data Center Engineers based on-site at data centers across the US. Set clear expectations, career paths and a culture of ownership across a team spread over many sites.

• Build and take part in a 24x7 on-call rotation with your team. Define coverage models, handover protocols and incident SLAs that hold up as the footprint grows.

• Serve as the escalation point for on-site incidents. Coordinate engineers, colocation providers and vendors to restore service quickly, and lead root-cause analysis after major incidents so the same problem doesn't happen again.

Site Delivery

• Own build timelines from site readiness through hardware delivery, rack-and-stack, cabling, validation and handoff to production.

• Run greenfield builds as multi-workstream programs. Coordinate third-party integrators, contractors and colocation providers to hit dates without cutting corners.

• Be on-site during key build phases to oversee vendor work, verify quality and make sure sites are production-ready.

Production Operations

• Be accountable for availability targets for production hardware at your sites. Run break/fix, repairs, RMAs and spares strategy so that availability is measured, reported and improving.

• Manage colocation providers and vendors day to day: escalations, remote-hands quality, power and cooling issues, and performance against contractual commitments.

Documentation and DCIM

• Make sure every site is fully documented in DCIM from day one. That covers rack elevations, power and cabling, asset location, and lifecycle status, all recorded as hardware arrives rather than filled in later.

• Treat infrastructure records as a source of truth that both operations and dependent teams rely on, giving them accurate, current visibility into where hardware is and what state it's in.

• Partner with tooling teams to bring DCIM online at new sites, and define documentation standards that hold up as the footprint grows.

Decommissioning and Hardware Lifecycle

• Own on-site decommissioning end to end: unracking, physical collections, serial number verification, chain of custody, and handoff for secure destruction.

• Partner with vendor management on IT asset disposition (ITAD) vendors. Make sure destruction certificates and compliance evidence are filed and audit-ready.

Security and Compliance

• Make sure your sites and team meet Cloudflare's physical security, access control, chain-of-custody and compliance obligations.

• Follow established physical access procedures, and work with security and compliance teams to develop new ones where these sites need them.

• Support audits with accurate, timely evidence. Treat audit readiness as a continuous standard, not something you prepare for once per audit cycle.

Automation and Operational Efficiency

• Find manual, repetitive work in build, break/fix, decommissioning and evidence collection. Influence tooling and automation teams to remove it.

• Evaluate and adopt AI-assisted workflows for incident triage, root-cause analysis, documentation and compliance evidence generation.

• Scale the operation through tooling, not just headcount.

Business Reporting

• Own weekly business reviews and monthly and quarterly reporting on availability, build progress, incidents and operational health to the Director and peer leaders.

• Partner with network, systems, hardware, supply chain and infrastructure engineering teams to make sure physical operations support what runs on top of them.

Who You Are

A builder who stays to operate. You've stood up sites and teams, and you take ownership of what happens after go-live. Delivering a build is where your job starts. If it isn't documented, it isn't done.

A leader of distributed teams. You've hired and built trust with on-site engineers spread across many locations, most of whom you won't see day to day. You know how to create accountability, consistent standards and a shared culture across sites, both remotely and in person.

Firm with partners. You hold colocation providers and vendors to high standards without becoming adversarial. You know the contract, you track performance, and you escalate when it's warranted.

Compliance-minded without being a compliance specialist. You understand why access controls and decommissioning chain of custody are audit controls. You treat compliance as part of doing the work well, not as overhead.

Automation-first. When something hurts, your first instinct is to fix the process or the tooling, not add people. You can turn an operational pain point into requirements engineering teams can act on.

Required Experience

• 6+ years in data center operations, including 3+ years directly managing on-site technical teams. At least part of that time should be leading geographically distributed teams.

• A track record of operating multi-site data center fleets at hyperscale or large-cloud scale.

• Hands-on experience with IT hardware, including servers, network devices, optics and cabling, not only facilities infrastructure.

• Enough hands-on depth to coach engineers on technical work and to judge the quality of vendor and contractor work.

• Experience owning sites across the full lifecycle: delivering greenfield data center or cage builds through third-party vendors, running them in steady state, and decommissioning hardware.

• Experience managing providers in Tier III+ colocation facilities and holding them accountable to commitments.

• Experience managing 24x7 on-call operations and incident escalation.

• Strong Layer 1 and Layer 2 fundamentals: structured cabling, fiber and optics, patching standards, switching basics, and troubleshooting physical connectivity for network and server hardware.

• Solid knowledge of data center power and cooling, rack design, high-density deployments and hardware lifecycle management.

• Strong understanding of DCIM and asset management systems. You should have a track record of keeping documentation accurate from day one, including rack, power, cabling and asset records maintained from hardware arrival through decommissioning.

• Working knowledge of the security and compliance frameworks common in enterprise-grade data centers. You should understand them well enough to run operations under them; auditor-level expertise isn't required.

• Strong program management skills across multiple vendors, sites and time-bound workstreams.

• A track record of reducing toil through tooling or process redesign.

• Excellent written and verbal communication, including regular business reviews and status, risk and availability reporting to leadership.

• Ability to travel regularly to data center sites. Expect more frequent travel during site builds, shifting to periodic visits as sites reach steady state.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience standing up a new data center operations function or region from zero.

• Background at a hyperscaler, cloud provider, major CDN or similarly fast-scaling infrastructure company.

• Experience with ITAD vendor programs and secure destruction requirements.

• Experience with PagerDuty or similar on-call and incident tooling.

• Familiarity with DCIM and source-of-truth tooling such as NetBox or Nlyte, Jira-based operational workflows, and Confluence documentation practices.

• Experience with remote-hands programs and vendor scorecards.

• Background in hardware diagnostics, burn-in or automated build validation.