Senior Solutions Engineering Manager, Named - Central

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 North California ABOUT THE ROLE WHAT YOU’LL DO AS A SENIOR SOLUTIONS ENGINEERING MANAGER, NAMED ACCOUNTS  As a Senior Solutions Engineering Manager for US Named Accounts at Cloudflare, you will lead a high-performing, geographically distributed team of Solutions Engineers partnering with our most strategic enterprise clients. You will work side-by-side with Enterprise Sales directors, Product Management, Engineering, and Customer Support to drive full-sales lifecycle technical activities and secure revenue targets. We are looking for an empathetic leader with an AI-native curiosity to streamline workflows and a player-coach mindset who isn't afraid to roll up their sleeves and dive into the technical details. Ultimately, you will foster a collaborative, transparent team culture dedicated to turning complex edge security, performance, and serverless challenges into scalable customer successes that help build a better Internet. RESPONSIBILITIES * Lead and Scale the US Named Team: Oversee the hiring, technical onboarding, continuous enablement, and pre-sales performance of a highly skilled team of Enterprise Solutions Engineers across the United States. * Drive Strategic Revenue Goals: Partner directly with Named Account Sales Executives and leadership to effectively manage complex sales cycles, coordinate technical proof activities (PoCs), and accurately forecast pipeline progression. * Shadow and Coach Technical Fieldwork: Step into the field as a player-coach to shadow customer engagements, establish technical best practices, and guide your team in breaking down complex concepts into digestible business value. * Champion Cross-Functional Alignment: Build deep operational relationships with Cloudflare's core Product, Engineering, Customer Success, and Support teams to establish reliable escalation pathways and accelerate feature request implementations for top-tier accounts. * Facilitate Hive-Mind Knowledge Sharing: Cultivate internal communication channels to ensure scalable technical solutions, architectural frameworks, and unique team discoveries are seamlessly shared across regional SE teams to prevent repeating mistakes. * Manage Team Health and Morale: Keep a constant pulse on your team's individual capacity, strengths, and career development goals, maintaining an open environment where transparent feedback and critical insights are actively welcomed. * Driving Enterprise Adoption: Accelerating the sales cycle by helping customers move past "AI hype" into production-ready, high-ROI use cases. * Technical Excellence: Building a team that is viewed by customers not just as vendors, but as trusted consultants with thorough understanding of AI and how Cloudflare can be positioned to help. DESIRABLE SKILLS, KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERIENCE MUST-HAVE SKILLS * Proven Technical Leadership: Minimum of 5+ years of experience directly managing and scaling a pre-sales Solutions Engineering team, coupled with 10+ years of related technology industry experience. * Enterprise Pre-Sales Track Record: A documented history of success driving technical pre-sales within the US Enterprise or Named Accounts market, showing strong alignment with sales methodologies like MEDDPICC. * Deep Architectural Expertise: Strong foundational knowledge of fundamental Internet protocols and cloud architectures, including OSI Model layers 1-7, DNS, BGP, TCP/IP, and SSL/TLS. * Communication: Exceptional ability to demystify complex AI concepts (like fine-tuning vs. RAG, or compute costs) for C-level executives, while remaining highly technical with data scientists. * Oversee the design and delivery of high-impact technical validation events (custom demos, hackathons, and scoped PoCs). * Ensure solutions adhere to enterprise-grade standards regarding AI ethics, data privacy, governance, and latency/cost optimization. * Customer Lifecycle: Clear understanding of the entire customer lifecycle management and ensure the team is properly aligned * Cross-Functional Influence: Demonstrated operational and analytical skills required to influence matrixed organizations, handle critical customer escalations, and manage distributed team resources effectively. * AI/ML Expertise: Proven, hands-on experience with AI/ML frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow), LLM orchestration tools (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex), vector databases, and MLOps pipelines. * Cloud & Architecture: Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and how to deploy scalable AI workloads. BONUS POINTS * Advanced Portfolio Exposure: Familiarity with modern, emerging technical landscapes such as Zero Trust security architectures, serverless computing (Workers), and post-quantum cryptography. * Diverse Domain Background: Prior foundational experience working across overlapping technical disciplines like software engineering, product management, financial consulting, or enterprise project delivery. * Serve as the subject matter expert on Generative AI, Large Language Models (LLMs), MLOps, and data architecture. Travel Requirement: * The position requires up to 50% travel for attending meetings with prospects or customers, participating in conferences and industry events, and collaborating with Cloudflare colleagues. COMPENSATION Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location. 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. For Bay Area based hires: Estimated annual salary of $244,000.00 - $336,000.00 Equity This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan. Benefits Cloudflare offers a complete package of benefits and programs to support you and your family.  Our benefits programs can help you pay health care expenses, support caregiving, build capital for the future and make life a little easier and fun!  The below is a description of our benefits for employees in the United States, and benefits may vary for employees based outside the U.S. Health & Welfare Benefits * Medical/Rx Insurance * Dental Insurance * Vision Insurance * Flexible Spending Accounts * Commuter Spending Accounts * Fertility & Family Forming Benefits * On-demand mental health support and Employee Assistance Program * Global Travel Medical Insurance Financial Benefits * Short and Long Term Disability Insurance * Life & Accident Insurance * 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan * Employee Stock Participation Plan Time Off * Flexible paid time off covering vacation and sick leave * Leave programs, including parental, pregnancy health, medical, and bereavement leave 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.

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 * San Francisco, US RESPONSIBILITIES * The Solution Engineering organization is responsible for the technical sale of the Cloudflare solution portfolio, ensuring maximal business value, fit-for-purpose solution design and adoption roadmap for our customers. * Reporting to the Solution Engineering Manager, the Majors Accounts Solutions Engineer is a Senior level role. You are a customer facing technologist within the Cloudflare Solutions Engineering team. You have strong experience in large account pre-sales management as well as excellent verbal and written communications skills suited for executive-level engagement. You are comfortable speaking about the Cloudflare vision and mission with C-level customer executives. Your role will be to build passionate champions within the technology ranks at your accounts, drive sales for identified opportunities, and leverage your relationships with these technical champions to build a revenue pipeline where no opportunities yet exist. * You will work within a high-profile pursuit team dedicated to certain strategic accounts, working closely with the majors account executives attached to these accounts. Specifically, we are looking for you to: * Build and maintain long term technical relationships with the technical buyers (executives, managers and individual contributors) at your assigned accounts, becoming a trusted advisor to those stakeholders. * Deeply understand the business-critical issues that your accounts are facing, and provide meaningful solution designs to facilitate technical validation of Cloudflare as a part of the customer’s infrastructure, including the coordination of Cloudflare colleagues throughout the sales and procurement cycle. * Identify and drive technical conversations in every possible line of business within the accounts, engaging key technical buyers with the purpose of uncovering new areas of potential revenue & showing value to all possible parts of your accounts. * Empower customers in their security and network transformation journeys, helping them to define strategies and architect necessary security controls aligned with Cloudflare product suites. * Be the voice of the customer internally at Cloudflare, engaging with and influencing Cloudflare’s Product and Engineering teams to meet your customers’ needs. * Represent and evangelize Cloudflare externally at Developer, Community, Technology, Cybersecurity and other industry events with thought leadership and expertise. DESIRABLE SKILLS, KNOWLEDGE, AND EXPERIENCE * Polished communication and executive presentation skills with ability to drive a discussion with a broad range of stakeholders (from the web developer to the CISO). * Relationship building: a proven track record of building deep technical relationships with engineers and senior executives in large and strategic accounts. Experience in managing various stakeholder relationships to build consensus on security solutions/projects. * Experience managing technical sales within large accounts. * Developing champion-style relationships * Driving technical wins * Assisting with technical validation * A deep understanding of core industry components of Cloudflare solutions (and a desire to learn more): * Internet security technologies including DDoS and DDoS mitigation, Firewalls, TLS, VPN, DLP * Networking technologies including TCP, UDP, DNS, IPv4 + IPv6, BGP routing, GRE, SD-WAN, MPLS, Global Traffic Management * HTTP technologies including reverse proxy (e.g., WAF and CDN), forward proxy (secure web gateway), serverless application development * Zero-trust network access (ZTNA & SASE) concepts including identity management and authentication * Cloud computing technologies such as AWS, GCP, Azure and others * Some scripting or programming experience with one or more of JavaScript, Python, Golang, BASH * Understanding of, or experience with, regulatory requirements such as FedRAMP, GDPR, PCI DSS, HIPAA, SOC-2, ISO/IEC. COMPENSATION Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location. * For San Francisco based hires: Estimated annual salary of $244,000 - $336,000. * Los Angeles based hires: Estimated annual salary of $234,000 - $321,000. 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. BENEFITS Cloudflare offers a complete package of benefits and programs to support you and your family.  Our benefits programs can help you pay health care expenses, support caregiving, build capital for the future and make life a little easier and fun!  The below is a description of our benefits for employees in the United States, and benefits may vary for employees based outside the U.S. HEALTH & WELFARE BENEFITS * Medical/Rx Insurance * Dental Insurance * Vision Insurance * Flexible Spending Accounts * Commuter Spending Accounts * Fertility & Family Forming Benefits * On-demand mental health support and Employee Assistance Program * Global Travel Medical Insurance FINANCIAL BENEFITS * Short and Long Term Disability Insurance * Life & Accident Insurance * 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan * Employee Stock Participation Plan TIME OFF * * Flexible paid time off covering vacation and sick leave * Leave programs, including parental, pregnancy health, medical, and bereavement leave 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.