Principal Customer Engineer, Start Up AI

About Us At Cloudflare, we are on a mission to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world’s largest networks that powers millions of websites and other Internet properties for customers ranging from individual bloggers to SMBs to Fortune 500 companies. Cloudflare protects and accelerates any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. Internet properties powered by Cloudflare all have web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with every request. As a result, they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. Cloudflare was named to Entrepreneur Magazine’s Top Company Cultures list and ranked among the World’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company. At Cloudflare, we’re not looking for people who wait for a polished roadmap; we’re looking for the builders who see the cracks in the Internet that everyone else has simply learned to live with. We value candidates who have the instinct to spot a "normalized" problem and the AI-native curiosity to create a solution using the latest tools. Our culture is built on iteration, leveraging AI to ship faster today to make it better tomorrow, while ensuring that every improvement, no matter how small, is shared across the team to lift everyone up. If you’re the type of person who values curiosity over bureaucracy, and that AI is a partner in solving tough problems to keep the Internet moving forward, you’ll fit right in. Available Locations Germany Responsibilities The Customer Engineer (CE) is the core driver of our technical go-to-market strategy: a trusted technical advisor and primary architect of the customer journey. You will bridge the gap between technical strategy and business value. You'll guide startup and AI customers from the first conversation about their AI ambitions through technical validation, production deployment, and long-term adoption and expansion. Sitting within the GTM organization and reporting to a 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, leveraging AI-augmented workflows to eliminate administrative toil so you can focus on high-value architectural design and driving measurable business outcomes across the Startup AI segment. Technical Discovery & Validation: Partner closely with Account Executives to lead technical deep-dive discovery and uncover what kind of AI problem a customer actually has. It might be building AI products and agents, governing how their people and agents use AI, or protecting internet-facing applications from AI-driven threats and traffic. Turn that into a sequenced plan rather than a feature tour. Capture business requirements and map startup and AI customer infrastructure (DNS, CDN, Zero Trust, Network Security, serverless and edge compute) to fit-for-purpose Cloudflare architectures and bespoke solutions. Define scope, success criteria, and technical evaluation plans for Proofs of Concept (PoCs) and Technical Validations, anchored in measurable quality, latency, and cost targets rather than subjective impressions. Rapidly build working, customer-specific prototypes. Deliver tailored technical presentations, architectural diagrams, and demonstrations that show how Cloudflare solves specific performance, security, reliability, and scale challenges. Proactively address complex technical objections, security compliance questions, and edge-case architectural requirements during the sales cycle. Take accountability for a suitable solution deployment strategy (Customer, Partner or Cloudflare Professional Services) being an integral part of all proposals. Customer Adoption & Value Realization: Oversee technical onboarding and implementation without executing it yourself, serving as the primary executive and engineering contact for the customer. Design structured migration and onboarding blueprints tailored to the customer's environment (e.g. DNS migrations, Zero Trust rollouts, WAF tuning guidance). Act as the lead consultant for customer engineering teams, walking them step-by-step through configuration best practices. Guide customers in taking AI applications and agents from prototype to production in a way that is reliable, safe, and affordable. That covers durable state and failure recovery for long-running agents; secure agent design such as defenses against prompt injection, scoped access, and human approval for sensitive actions; and the right model choices for each task. After go-live, help customers keep AI workloads healthy through tracing, quality and cost monitoring, and safe rollout of model and prompt changes, feeding production learnings back into evaluation. Partner with Account Executives to own discovery, demos, onboarding, technical health, risk, and expansion strategy. Proactively monitor customer health scores and telemetry to ensure rapid time-to-value, resolve integration bottlenecks, and reduce deployment risk as customers move from early-stage development to production scale. Commercial Accountability & Expansion: Carry a variable quota tied directly to new business acquisition and/or ongoing account growth. Be commercially accountable for ensuring deep platform adoption, retaining revenue, and identifying strategic cross-sell and up-sell opportunities based on product usage data and the evolving needs of startup and AI customers. Translate AI spend into clear business cases, such as cost per task or per resolved request. Lead technical Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) to translate platform capabilities into return on investment for founders, C-level executives, and engineering leaders. Ecosystem & Business Development: Help build and grow Cloudflare's presence in the startup and AI ecosystem. Develop relationships with incubators, accelerators, venture capital firms, founder communities, and developer meetups to generate new pipeline alongside Account Executives. Represent Cloudflare at startup events, demo days, and hackathons, and identify high-potential AI startups early in their journey. Trusted Advisory: Act as a trusted technical advisor throughout the entire customer lifecycle, maintaining a continuous, deep relationship with founders, CTOs, engineering leaders, and other key stakeholders from initial onboarding through maturity, renewal, and expansion. Provide thought partnership on architecture, agent design, AI governance and compliance (e.g. GDPR, EU AI Act, data residency), security posture, and deployment confidence. Identify potential deployment risks or integration bottlenecks early, and provide remediation strategies to de-risk customer outcomes. AI Orchestration & Workflow Automation: Use AI agents, coding agents, Large Language Models (LLMs), and internal platforms as a default way of working. Automate routine tasks such as meeting preparation, RFP/Security Questionnaire responses, sandbox provisioning, demo setup, basic telemetry monitoring, and internal/external documentation, so you have more time for strategic customer advisory. Apply AI-assisted workflows to support customer engineering teams and improve the speed and quality of technical validation. Share hands-on learnings and gaps with product teams as a direct feedback channel. Education & Enablement: Partner closely with the Enablement Team to design, build, and govern technical resources. Define, document, and educate both internal teams and customers on deliverables such as Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), architectural best practices, and technical guides to continuously raise the technical baseline across the organization. Support technical enablement for startup and AI customers through workshops, code samples, documentation, and developer onboarding. This role may require travel up to 20–50% to attend customer meetings, conferences, industry events, and in-person team collaboration. Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience Experience: Experience in a customer-facing technical role, such as Solutions Engineering, Customer Engineering, Professional Services, Sales Engineering, Technical Account Management, or as a Forward Deployed Engineer (years of experience required will vary based on Associate, Senior, Staff, or Principal leveling). Experience working with startups, AI companies, digital-native businesses, or as part of a startup engineering team is strongly valued. Startup Ecosystem Network: An established network within incubators, accelerators, venture capital, and the broader startup scene is highly desirable, along with the drive to take on business development activities and open doors to new relationships. Architectural Mindset: Ability to white-board, design, and articulate complex enterprise, startup, AI application, agent, network, and security architectures clearly. 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, founders, and technical leaders. 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, mid-market, or startup 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. Business fluency in German is required. Technical Breadth: We do not expect every candidate to be an expert in every domain. Qualified candidates will demonstrate depth in at least four of the technical areas below: • Internet fundamentals: Deep understanding of how the Internet works, including OSI Model layers 1–7, BGP, GRE, TCP/UDP, DNS (authoritative and recursive), HTTP(S), and SSL/TLS. • Security: Expertise in the security of Internet properties, including WAF, Bot Management, Firewalls, Rate Limiting, (M)TLS, Zero Trust, and SASE concepts. • Performance: Expertise in the performance of Internet properties, including speed, latency, caching, video streaming, HTTP/2, and TLS 1.3. • AI Engineering: Solid grounding in AI model fundamentals (model size, context length, reasoning models, fine-tuning versus prompting, and matching the right model to the job). Familiarity with common agent patterns, including knowing when a simple workflow beats an agent, and with open agent frameworks and standards such as MCP. Understanding of how to evaluate and operate AI systems in production. • AI-Augmented Workflows: Familiarity with prompt engineering, building prototypes with coding agents, AI-assisted scripting and log analysis, and workflow automation to augment everyday CE workflows. • Coding/Scripting: Proficiency in Python, JavaScript, Bash, Lua, Go, or similar languages to write custom integration scripts, API connectors, and edge computing functions. • Developer Platform Fluency: Experience designing, building, deploying or scaling applications using RESTful/GraphQL APIs, SDKs, webhooks, and developer tooling in cloud-native environments. Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi), CI/CD pipelines, and observability for developer-led deployments. Bonus Points • Technical Enablement: Track record of creating and delivering technical enablement (workshops, code samples, documentation, or developer onboarding) that accelerates customer adoption of complex platforms. • Applied AI Knowledge: Hands-on experience with retrieval and knowledge systems (RAG, embeddings, reranking, agentic search), domain adaptation through lightweight fine-tuning, sandboxed execution environments for agents that write and run code, LLM orchestration, or model-access controls. • AI Traffic & the Agentic Web: Understanding of how AI crawlers and agents interact with internet-facing applications: protecting AI endpoints, managing bot and agent access, and exposing services to agents. • Regulatory Knowledge: Understanding of regulatory requirements such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, SOC 2, GDPR, and the EU AI Act. • Hyperscaler / Digital Native / Startup Background: Talent coming out of hyperscalers, digital natives, distributed systems environments, or startups is strongly valued for its deeper cloud fluency, advanced architecture depth, and ability to operate effectively in fast-moving, ambiguous environments. Compensation For Germany based hires: Estimated annual salary is between €138,000 - €197,000. This role is eligible to earn incentive compensation under Cloudflare's Sales Compensation Plan. The estimated annual salary range includes the on-target incentive compensation that may be attained in this role under the Sales Compensation Plan. Equity: This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare's equity plan. 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 [email protected] or via mail at 101 Townsend St. San Francisco, CA 94107.