Senior Customer Engineer, Japan

Location: Tokyo, Japan

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, 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 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, Zero Trust and Developer Platforms).
• 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.
• Strategic Alignment: Own the long-term technical relationship across the entire customer lifecycle, ensuring continuous alignment between the customer’s evolving business goals and our product roadmap.
• 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.
• 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

• Experience: Experience in a customer-facing technical role, such as Solutions Engineering, Customer Engineering, Sales Engineering, or as a Forward Deployed Engineer.
• 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 enterprise sales cycles.
• Communication: Exceptional presentation and stakeholder management skills, capable of bridging the gap between deep technical implementation details and high-level C-suite business strategy.

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

• Cloudflare Developer Stack Experience: Hands-on experience building, deploying, or architecting solutions using Cloudflare's developer platform and AI ecosystem, specifically Workers AI and AI Gateway.
• 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 This role features a competitive base salary and a variable commission structure tied directly to the successful execution of full-lifecycle commercial targets, including new business acquisition, ongoing adoption milestones, and overall account expansion.

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.