Senior Customer Engineer, SLED South West (Southern California or Arizona)

Available Locations: Southern California or Arizona

*This is a work-from-home 100% remote role, but you should reside in one of the regions."

What you’ll do as a Senior Customer Engineer SLED

About the Role

At Cloudflare, we are on a mission to help build a better Internet. As the architectural complexity of enterprise solutions scales, we are evolving how we partner with our customers. The Customer Engineer (CE) represents the core driver of our technical go-to-market strategy: a trusted advisor who owns the technical relationship from the initial discovery phase through to long-term adoption and ongoing account expansion.
Sitting within the GTM organization and reporting to the Regional Customer Engineering Leader, this specialized role will focus heavily on our SLED (State, Local, and Education) and Local Government sectors. You will not hand off your customers once an initial agreement is reached. Instead, you will operate as a quota-carrying technologist, utilizing AI-augmented workflows to eliminate administrative toil so you can focus on high-value architectural design and driving measurable business outcomes across the entire public sector customer journey.
Key Responsibilities

• Technical Validation: Partner closely with Account Executives to lead technical discovery, build bespoke architectures, and deliver compelling product demonstrations and Proof of Concepts (PoCs) across Cloudflare’s portfolio (Security, Networking, and Developer Platforms) tailored to public sector procurement and compliance standards.
• Customer Adoption & Value Realization: Lead and/or provide oversight to technical onboarding and implementation, serving as the primary executive and engineering contact for the customer. You will partner with Account Executives to own discovery, demos, onboarding, technical health, risk, and expansion strategy. You will proactively monitor dynamic customer health scores and telemetry to ensure rapid time-to-value and resolve integration bottlenecks common in municipal and educational IT infrastructures.
• Commercial Accountability & Expansion: Carry a variable quota tied directly to new business acquisition and/or ongoing account growth. You will be commercially accountable for ensuring deep platform adoption, retaining revenue, and identifying strategic cross-sell and up-sell opportunities based on product usage data. Lead technical Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) to translate platform capabilities into return on investment for C-level executives.
• Trusted Advisory: Act as a trusted technical advisor throughout the entire customer lifecycle, maintaining a continuous, deep relationship with key stakeholders from initial onboarding through maturity, renewal, and expansion.
• AI Orchestration & Workflow Automation: Act as an "AI-Augmented" engineer. Leverage AI agents and internal platforms to automate routine tasks such as RFP/Security Questionnaire responses, sandbox provisioning, and basic telemetry monitoring, reclaiming your time for strategic customer advisory.

Minimum Qualifications

• Public Sector Expertise: Proven experience working with or selling into SLED, Local Government, or Municipal agencies, with a deep understanding of public sector buying cycles, compliance requirements, and unique government IT constraints.
• Experience: Experience in a customer-facing technical role, such as Solutions Engineering, Customer Engineering, Sales Engineering, or as a Forward Deployed Engineer (years of experience required will vary based on Associate, Senior, Staff, or Principal leveling).
• Technical Acumen: Broad technical expertise spanning web security, networking (routing, DNS, DDoS mitigation), cloud infrastructure, and enterprise architecture.
• Commercial Mindset: Proven track record of operating in a quota-carrying or revenue-aligned environment, with a strong understanding of SaaS metrics, business value translation, and public sector/enterprise sales cycles.
• Communication: Exceptional presentation and stakeholder management skills, capable of bridging the gap between deep technical implementation details and high-level government C-suite/elected official business strategy.

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

• Cloudflare AI Stack Experience: Hands-on experience building, deploying, or architecting solutions using Cloudflare's developer platform and AI ecosystem, specifically Workers AI, AI Gateway, and Vectorize.
• Applied AI Knowledge: Experience with prompt engineering, Large Language Model (LLM) orchestration, or Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures.
• Coding/Scripting: Proficiency in Python, JavaScript, or similar languages to write custom integration scripts, API connectors, and edge computing functions.

• Compensation

  Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.

  • For San Francisco based hires: Estimated annual salary of $231,000-$275,000+ OTE, Base + Commissions
  • Los Angeles based hires: Estimated annual salary of $221,000 - $267,000 OTE, Base + Commissions.

Equity
This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan.

Benefits
Cloudflare offers a complete package of benefits and programs to support you and your family. Our benefits programs can help you pay health care expenses, support caregiving, build capital for the future and make life a little easier and fun! The below is a description of our benefits for employees in the United States, and benefits may vary for employees based outside the U.S.

Health & Welfare Benefits

• Medical/Rx Insurance
• Dental Insurance
• Vision Insurance
• Flexible Spending Accounts
• Commuter Spending Accounts
• Fertility & Family Forming Benefits
• On-demand mental health support and Employee Assistance Program
• Global Travel Medical Insurance

Financial Benefits

• Short and Long Term Disability Insurance
• Life & Accident Insurance
• 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan
• Employee Stock Participation Plan

Time Off

• Flexible paid time off covering vacation and sick leave
• Leave programs, including parental, pregnancy health, medical, and bereavement leave