Manager, Presales Customer Engineering

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.

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.

This position may require access to information protected under U.S. export control laws, including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations. Please note that any offer of employment may be conditioned on your authorization to receive software or technology controlled under these U.S. export laws without sponsorship for an export license.

Cloudflare is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunity for all people and place great value in both diversity and inclusiveness. All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to their, or any other person's, perceived or actual race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, family care status, or any other basis protected by law. We are an AA/Veterans/Disabled Employer.

Cloudflare provides reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities. Please tell us if you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job. Examples of reasonable accommodations include, but are not limited to, changing the application process, providing documents in an alternate format, using a sign language interpreter, or using specialized equipment. If you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job, please contact us via e-mail at hr@cloudflare.com or via mail at 101 Townsend St. San Francisco, CA 94107.