Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

Available Locations: Sydney, Australia

About the Role

Cloudflare’s Senior Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) operate at the intersection of product engineering and customer impact.

As an FDE, you will be embedded within one of Cloudflare’s most strategic global customers, working side-by-side with their engineering teams to build and deploy solutions using Cloudflare’s platform. Unlike traditional Solutions Architects or consultants, you will write production code, shape technical architecture, and directly influence how Cloudflare products are used at massive scale.

You will operate as a technical extension of both organizations - helping the customer ship faster while surfacing real-world product insights back to Cloudflare engineering.

Responsibilities

This role is ideal for engineers who want to:

• Stay deeply technical
• Work on real production systems
• Influence product direction
• Build long-term partnerships with world-class engineering teams
• Deep Technical Embedding: Serve as the dedicated, long-term technical partner within a strategic customer’s engineering organization, operating as a trusted extension of their team.
• Production-Level Engineering: Design, build, and deploy production-ready code and configurations directly into customer infrastructure using the Cloudflare platform.
• Technical Accountability: Own the account's technical success across the entire Cloudflare portfolio. Serve as the primary technical point of contact, with other Cloudflare technical resources taking direction from your technical strategy for the account.
• Operational Integration: Participate in customer engineering rituals, including daily standups, design reviews, and real-time incident response.
• Platform Advocacy & Adoption: Identify opportunities to accelerate the adoption of Cloudflare services, unlocking new capabilities across the customer’s tech stack.
• Platform Breadth & Depth: Deep technical competence in building production applications on a modern stack, combined with the willingness and ability to go deep on all Cloudflare product areas. From Workers to security, networking, and observability.
• Feedback Loop & Product Influence: Surface real-world edge cases and product gaps directly to Cloudflare’s Product and Engineering teams to influence the developer platform roadmap.
• Strategic Relationship Management: Establish and maintain trusted technical relationships with senior leadership (Staff+ engineers, Directors, and VPs).
• On-Site Presence: Maintain a regular on-site presence at customer locations to foster deep collaboration and cultural alignment.

Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience

• Proven Engineering Pedigree: 7+ years of professional software engineering experience. You are a builder at heart, with a track record of delivering production-grade systems, not just advising on them.
• Languages: You are experienced with modern languages like TypeScript, Rust, Golang.
• Production Ownership & Operational Maturity: You have owned mission-critical services with real-world users. You understand the gravity of on-call rotations, the urgency of incident response, and the architectural rigor required to maintain "five nines" uptime.
• Active Practitioner: You are currently in the IDE. You have a "ship-first" mentality and maintain a high velocity, staying current with modern frameworks, languages, and deployment patterns.
• Full-Stack Architectural Depth: Broad technical fluency across the entire stack—from frontend performance and backend logic to database optimization and distributed infrastructure.
• AI-Native Development: You have integrated AI-augmented workflows (e.g., Windsurf, OpenCode) into your daily development cycle to accelerate prototyping and delivery.
• Systems Design & Strategic Thinking: Ability to decompose complex business requirements into scalable, resilient technical architectures. You can visualize the "big picture" without losing sight of the implementation details.
• Cloud Ecosystem Fluency: Deep experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including an understanding of serverless, networking, and security primitives.
• High Agency & Navigating Ambiguity: You are a self-starter who thrives in "zero-to-one" environments. You don't wait for a ticket; you identify the problem and own the solution from end-to-end.
• Executive Presence: Comfortable engaging in high-stakes technical and strategic discussions with VP-level stakeholders, with the ability to translate complex engineering trade-offs into business impact.

Bonus Points

• Direct experience building on Cloudflare Workers, or the broader Cloudflare Developer Platform.
• Previous experience at a fast-paced startup or in a customer-facing engineering role where you operated directly within a partner’s codebase.
• A visible public profile, including open-source contributions, technical blogging, or speaking engagements at industry conferences.