Senior Network Engineer

Available Location: Austin, Atlanta, Denver, Seattle, Mexico City, Mexico

 

Role Summary

Cloudflare operates one of the world's largest and most interconnected networks, spanning 335+ cities across every region of the globe. We are looking for a Senior Network Engineer to join our Edge Network & Backbone team — someone who brings deep operational experience, an AI-first mindset, and the instinct to mentor and lift the engineers around them. In your first year, this role is deliberately hands-on: you'll be in the operational trenches, owning complex faults, driving capacity work, and setting the standard for how we run the network. Beyond that, you'll help shape how the team works — building AI-enabled tooling and agents that reduce toil, accelerate troubleshooting, and make the whole team more effective. This is a North American based role, but you'll be joining one global team: the sun never sets on Cloudflare, and our engineers hand off work across every time zone to keep the network running around the clock.

Role Responsibilities

• Own the technical operation, engineering, and architecture of Cloudflare's global network, including planning, installation, and day-to-day management of hardware and software across the edge and backbone.
• Serve as a hands-on operational anchor for the team — diagnosing and resolving complex network faults, owning incident response end-to-end including on-call rotation, and contributing to post-incident reviews to drive continuous improvement.
• Build production AI agents for network operations. Design, ship, and own LLM-powered tools that integrate with our operational systems of record via tool calling. Ship them with evals, observability of agent decisions, cost tracking, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints where autonomous action carries blast radius.
• Apply AI to accelerate troubleshooting. Use and extend our internal AI platform (Workers AI, AI Gateway) to speed up root cause analysis, pattern recognition across faults, and operational decision-making under pressure.
• Architect network improvements that lower latency, reduce packet loss, and increase scale — optimising end user experience across Cloudflare's global infrastructure.
• Mentor and develop junior engineers on the team, setting technical standards, conducting structured troubleshooting sessions, and building a culture of operational excellence and continuous learning.
• Collaborate with internal teams on cross-functional network projects, contributing to design documentation, SOPs, and knowledge base articles that outlast any individual contributor.

Role Requirements (Must-Have Skills)

• Proven track record in large-scale network engineering and operations.
• Proficiency in Python and/or TypeScript and/or Go sufficient to build, debug, and maintain agent code, not just to glue scripts together.
• Working knowledge of agent integration patterns: function/tool calling, MCP or equivalent, retrieval over operational corpora (runbooks, postmortems, change history), and prompt iteration with evals.
• Experience reasoning about agent failure modes in production: hallucination guards, fallback paths, rollback, blast-radius control.
• Deep expertise in BGP and anycast routing, with the ability to diagnose and resolve complex routing issues in a production environment.
• Strong understanding of MPLS and Segment Routing.
• Proficiency across multiple network vendor operating systems (Juniper, Cisco, Arista, or similar).
• Experience with network automation frameworks such as SaltStack, Ansible, or equivalent, and a strong instinct for solving operational problems through code.
• Ability to prioritise effectively and lead calmly when faced with high-pressure scenarios.
• An effective communicator who can adapt their style to any audience — whether guiding a junior engineer through a fault or presenting a network architecture decision to senior leadership.

Nice-to-Have Skills

• Shipped LLM-powered tooling into production use by a team other than your own, with measurable operational impact.
• Professional-level network certification (JNCIP, CCNP, or equivalent or higher).
• Experience with optical transport technologies such as CWDM and DWDM.
• Linux system administration.
• Experience writing network configuration and design documentation at an architectural level.