Principal Customer Engineer, Start Up AI
Cloudflare6 hours ago
Remote, GermanyStaff+
Responsibilities
- Lead technical discovery with Account Executives and translate customer requirements into Cloudflare architectures and sequenced technical validation plans.
- Design and present architectural diagrams, demonstrations, prototypes, PoCs, and technical evaluations tied to quality, latency, and cost targets.
- Guide customer onboarding, migrations, Zero Trust rollouts, WAF tuning, AI agent productionization, and deployment-risk reduction without executing the implementation directly.
- Advise customers on agent durability, failure recovery, prompt-injection defenses, scoped access, human approval, model selection, tracing, quality monitoring, cost monitoring, and safe rollout practices.
- Own technical customer health, adoption, renewal, expansion strategy, QBRs, and measurable business-value translation in partnership with Account Executives.
- Carry a variable quota and identify cross-sell, up-sell, and new-business opportunities based on customer usage and evolving needs.
- Develop relationships with incubators, accelerators, venture capital firms, founder communities, and developer meetups to generate startup and AI pipeline.
- Automate customer-engineering workflows using AI agents, coding agents, LLMs, and internal platforms.
- Create and deliver technical enablement resources, workshops, code samples, documentation, SOPs, and developer onboarding materials.
Requirements
- Experience in a customer-facing technical role such as Solutions Engineering, Customer Engineering, Professional Services, Sales Engineering, Technical Account Management, or Forward Deployed Engineering.
- Experience with startups, AI companies, digital-native businesses, or startup engineering teams is strongly valued.
- An established startup ecosystem network involving incubators, accelerators, venture capital, or founder communities is highly desirable.
- Ability to design and clearly explain enterprise, startup, AI application, agent, network, and security architectures.
- Strong communication, presentation, consulting, advisory, and stakeholder-management skills across engineers, founders, executives, and C-suite leaders.
- Experience in quota-carrying or revenue-aligned environments and understanding of SaaS metrics, business-value translation, and sales cycles.
- Business fluency in German is required.
- Depth in at least four technical areas, including Internet fundamentals, security, performance, AI engineering, AI-augmented workflows, coding and scripting, or developer-platform fluency.
- Proficiency in Python, JavaScript, Bash, Lua, Go, or similar languages for integrations, API connectors, and edge-computing functions.
- Experience with cloud-native application platforms, APIs, SDKs, webhooks, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, and observability.
- Preferred experience includes technical enablement, RAG, embeddings, reranking, agentic search, lightweight fine-tuning, sandboxed agent execution, LLM orchestration, model-access controls, AI traffic protection, and relevant regulatory frameworks.
Benefits
- Germany-based hires have an estimated annual compensation range of €138,000–€197,000, including on-target incentive compensation under the Sales Compensation Plan.
- Eligible employees may participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan.
- The role is based in Germany and may require 20–50% travel for customer meetings, conferences, industry events, and team collaboration.
- Candidates progressing to the offer stage may be asked to attend an in-person interview at a Cloudflare office or hub.
Tech Stack
Categories
Solutions Engineering
About Cloudflare
Cloudflare builds a global network that provides CDN, DDoS mitigation, DNS, Zero Trust security, and developer/edge computing tools for organizations of all sizes. It sells subscriptions to its cloud-based platform and usage-based services that protect and accelerate web sites, APIs, and corporate networks, plus serverless apps via Workers. Founded in 2009 and headquartered in San Francisco, it is a public company traded on the NYSE (ticker: NET).