Manager, Presales Customer Engineering

Available Locations: Sydney, Australia

What you will do as a Manager, Customer Engineering

The Manager, Customer Engineering leads a team of Customer Engineers (CE) who own the full customer technical journey from initial discovery through long-term adoption, retention, and account expansion.

Sitting within the GTM organization and reporting to a Customer Engineering Senior Leader, you will be responsible for building, coaching, and enabling a high-performing team of quota-carrying technologists. You will ensure your team leverages AI-augmented workflows to eliminate administrative toil and focus on high-value architectural design, technical validation, and the delivery of measurable business outcomes across the entire customer journey.

This is a player-coach role where you have the ability and willingness to step into the field and lead by example. You will manage daily, forecast weekly, and hire always while remaining deeply connected to the technical, commercial, and operational realities of the customer engineering motion.

Key Responsibilities

• Team Development & Performance: Recruit, onboard, coach, and retain a diverse team of Customer Engineers across multiple levels. Set clear expectations, conduct regular 1:1s and performance reviews, and maintain a strong feedback culture that accelerates growth.
• Pipeline & Forecasting: Manage your team's opportunity pipeline, forecast new business and expansion outcomes weekly, and own the accuracy of your team's number. Identify risk early and coach reps on deal strategy.
• Commercial Accountability: Be accountable for your team's achievement of new business acquisition, expansion, adoption, and consumption targets. Partner closely with Sales, Customer Experience, Professional Services, and regional leadership on account planning and execution.
• Deal Coaching & Technical Strategy: Accompany Customer Engineers on critical customer calls, QBRs, discovery sessions, and PoC reviews. Provide real-time coaching on architecture, commercial positioning, and executive communication.
• Operational Excellence: Ensure the team operates efficiently within established GTM processes (forecasting, opportunity management, account planning, QBR cadence). Use dashboards and operational reviews to spot trends, unblock friction, and drive consistency.
• AI & Productivity Enablement: Champion the adoption of AI agents, LLMs, and automation tools across the team. Identify opportunities to reduce toil, improve response quality, and scale technical advisory impact.
• Cross-Functional Leadership: Serve as the voice of your team and your territory in leadership meetings. Partner with Product, Engineering, Support, Marketing, and Enablement to surface field feedback and advocate for customer and team needs.
• Culture & Values: Model Cloudflare's values and build an inclusive, high-performance team culture rooted in curiosity, ownership, and continuous improvement.

Minimum Qualifications

• Experience: 5+ Years of proven experience leading quota carrying customer-facing technical teams in a SaaS, cloud, or infrastructure environment. Track record of hiring, developing, and retaining technical talent. Prior quota-carrying Solutions Engineering, Customer Engineering, Sales Engineering, or related technical field experience is strongly preferred.
• Architectural Mindset: Ability to white-board, design, and articulate complex enterprise network and security architectures clearly enough to guide coaching and deal review.
• Consultative & Advisory Skills: Excellent communication skills with the ability to translate deeply technical concepts into business outcomes for both hands-on engineers and C-level executives.
• Revenue Acumen: Demonstrated success owning and forecasting a revenue number, preferably in an enterprise B2B SaaS or infrastructure environment. Deep understanding of enterprise sales cycles, SaaS metrics, ACV, renewal, and expansion motions.
• Leadership & Coaching: Excellent people management skills with the ability to coach technical sellers through complex deals, difficult conversations, and career growth. Comfortable giving direct, actionable feedback.
• Communication: Exceptional written and verbal communication with the ability to influence executives, peers, and cross-functional teams. Capable of representing the team in executive QBRs and regional business reviews.
• AI Proficiency: Familiarity with AI-augmented workflows, LLMs, and automation approaches that improve team productivity. Willing to lead by example in adopting AI tools.
• Technical Fluency: We do not expect managers to be hands-on engineers across every domain. Qualified candidates will demonstrate fluency in at least two or three of the following technical areas, with the ability to follow architecture discussions and coach reps:
• Internet fundamentals: Strong foundational understanding of how the Internet works, including DNS, HTTP(S), TCP/IP, and SSL/TLS.
• Security: Foundational knowledge of security concepts such as WAF, Bot Management, Zero Trust, SASE, and threat mitigation.
• Performance: Foundational knowledge of performance concepts such as caching, latency, content delivery, and traffic steering.
• Platform / Cloud Fluency: Hands-on experience with cloud platforms, edge services, APIs, automation, or developer tooling.

Strongly Preferred Qualifications (The "Good-to-Haves")

• Cloudflare Ecosystem Expertise: Experience with Cloudflare's product portfolio or familiarity with CDN, security edge, Zero Trust, developer platform, or AI workloads.
• Scaled Management Experience: Experience managing managers or teams distributed across regions and time zones.
• GTM Process Design: Track record of improving operational cadence, enablement, and forecasting discipline within a fast-growing technical sales organization.
• Regulatory Knowledge: Understanding of compliance frameworks such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, SOC 2, GDPR, or FedRAMP.
• Hyperscaler / Digital Native Background: Talent coming out of hyperscalers, digital natives, distributed systems environments, or startups is strongly valued for its deeper cloud fluency and advanced architecture depth.

Education:

Undergraduate or graduate degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Business, or a related field.

Travel

This role may require travel up to 25–50% to attend customer meetings, team offsites, industry events, and in-person collaboration.