Customer Reliability Engineer Jobs in Austin, TX

Job Summary:
Cloudflare is on a mission to help build a better Internet and is seeking a Senior Customer Reliability Engineer to enhance the reliability of its services. The role involves both rapid response to high-severity incidents and proactive engineering to build capabilities that prevent issues, ensuring critical infrastructure for various customers.
Responsibilities:
• Own the most complex, high-severity customer issues end-to-end, from first signal through confirmed resolution.
• Lead deep-dive debugging across the full stack: edge, network, DNS, transport, APIs, application, customer-side configuration.
• Reproduce defects, validate fixes with Engineering, and confirm customer-side resolution.
• Produce postmortems other engineers rely on.
• Hold on-call for high-severity incidents as part of a global rotation that includes weekends.
• Analyze support and telemetry signals across the customer base to find systemic risks before they become incidents.
• Contribute monitoring, detection, and diagnostic capability to the core product and the engineering systems that give Customer Support early visibility into customer-affecting issues.
• Define customer-facing reliability metrics (error rates, resolution times, repeat-contact rates) and drive measurable improvement.
• Write automation that reduces mean-time-to-detect and mean-time-to-resolve.
• Manage the technical escalation lifecycle with clear ownership and timely communication.
• Partner with Product Engineering to drive fixes, workarounds, and configuration changes that address underlying gaps.
• Represent the customer reliability perspective in engineering syncs, incident reviews, and post-mortem processes.
• Raise the technical floor of Customer Support through pair-debugging, structured knowledge transfer, and shared tooling.
• Document diagnostic procedures and resolution patterns in runbooks, internal knowledge bases, and AI skills.
• Share insights from customer-facing incidents to improve product documentation and operational readiness.
• Maintain deep, current expertise across Cloudflare's product portfolio: edge networking, DNS, CDN, WAF, DDoS mitigation, Zero Trust, Workers, and our developer platform.
• Anticipate customer impact from new releases and architecture changes.
• Serve as a go-to subject-matter expert in one or more domains.
Qualifications:
Required:
• Minimum 5 years of hands-on experience in site reliability engineering, escalation engineering, systems engineering, or a comparable deeply technical support / operations role, with at least 2 years in customer-facing environments.
• Strong foundation in networking and security: TCP/IP fundamentals: OSI model, IPv4/IPv6 addressing, subnetting, routing, switching.
• Core protocols: DNS, HTTP/S, TLS/SSL, SMTP, SNMP, NTP.
• Routing protocols: BGP, OSPF, including path selection and route propagation.
• Firewall concepts: stateful/stateless inspection, rule sets, NAT, ACLs.
• VPN and encryption: IPSec, SSL/TLS tunnels, GRE.
• Zero Trust architecture, network segmentation, modern security models.
• Proficiency with observability and diagnostic tooling: packet capture and analysis (Wireshark, tcpdump), log aggregation (Kibana, Elasticsearch), metrics dashboards (Grafana), distributed tracing.
• Strong scripting and automation skills (Bash, Python) with a track record of shipping tooling that improves reliability and reduces toil.
• Experience with incident management, postmortem culture, and SLO/SLI-based reliability practices.
• Excellent written and verbal communication. Able to convey complex technical information clearly to engineers, leadership, and customers.
• Comfort owning ambiguous, cross-layer problems. Composure under pressure during high-severity incidents.
Preferred:
• SRE, DevOps, or platform engineering experience with direct customer-facing accountability.
• Deep expertise at both L3/L4 (network infrastructure) and L7 (application protocols, DNS, HTTP, WebSocket).
• Expert-level proficiency with Linux command-line tools: curl, dig, git, traceroute, mtr, strace, ss.
• Data-at-scale analysis using SQL, PromQL, or equivalent.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi), and container orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker).
• Track record of building internal tooling or diagnostic utilities that measurably improved team efficiency.
• Demonstrated technical leadership: mentoring engineers, driving cross-team initiatives, influencing outcomes without direct authority.
• Experience applying AI/ML to production engineering or operational workflows.
• Comfort engaging directly with enterprise customer engineering teams, including on calls during incidents.
Company:
Cloudflare is a web performance and security company that provides online services to protect and accelerate websites online. Founded in 2009, the company is headquartered in San Francisco, USA, with a team of 1001-5000 employees. The company is currently Late Stage.