Escalation Engineer, Zero Trust
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.
Job Location: Austin, TX
About the Department
The Customer Support Team solves complicated problems and answers technical inquiries via phone, email, chat, and social media. Whether it is a WordPress blogger using our services for free or a global Enterprise business with petabytes of web traffic, our team is always eager to assist. We are the eyes and ears of Cloudflare, acting as the real-time voice of the customer to help communicate their needs and real-world use cases back to the rest of the company - to help build a better service and future product development.
Role Summary
The Cloudflare Escalation Engineer is a technical resource within support responsible for owning and resolving the most complex customer escalations. This role partners closely with Technical Support Engineers, proactively swarms on challenging cases, and provides hands-on guidance to accelerate issue resolution. Escalation Engineers lead deep technical investigations across the full stack, isolate and reproduce defects, and ensure accurate, timely communication throughout the escalation lifecycle. While they collaborate with Engineering and Product teams as needed, their primary focus is empowering the support organization, improving customer reliability, and driving high-quality outcomes for escalated customers. They contribute critical insights, document new knowledge, and help shape processes and readiness that strengthen the overall support experience.
Role Responsibilities
- Advanced Troubleshooting & Root Cause Analysis
- Investigate the most complex, high-impact customer issues escalated from front-line support (TSEs) and directly raised by customers.
- Perform deep-dive debugging across the full technology stack application, database, infrastructure, APIs, and integrations.
- Serve as a subject matter expert in supporting Zero Trust technologies such as identity and access management (IAM), secure access service edge (SASE), endpoint security, and network segmentation tools.
- Troubleshoot complex technical issues across a broad set of systems including authentication flows (SSO, MFA), policy enforcement, and secure application access.
- Use logs, traces, diagnostics to identify the underlying cause.
- Work with Engineering to validate defects, create reproducible scenarios, and confirm fixes.
- Provide coverage (shift rotation including possibility of weekends and Pacific Time hours) for technical troubleshooting of escalated issues.
- Cross-Functional Escalation Management
- Manage escalation lifecycle from intake to closure, ensuring technical accuracy and timely communication.
- Partner with Product and Engineering teams to drive bug fixes or workarounds.
- Communicate status, risk, and resolution progress clearly to support leaders and customers (as appropriate).
- Swarming & Collaboration with Support Teams
- Proactively swarm on critical or complex cases with Technical Support Engineers within their regional or skill-based Pod.
- Provide real-time guidance and mentoring during troubleshooting.
- Be an expert engineer in the team, help front-line engineers improve their technical depth and escalation readiness.
- Knowledge Creation & Enablement
- Document new findings, diagnostic steps, and resolutions in internal knowledge bases.
- Share insights from escalations to improve product documentation and support training.
- Contribute to runbooks and automation that help prevent future escalations.
- Readiness & Product Expertise
- Stay current with new product releases, architecture changes, and known issues.
- Participate in engineering syncs or release readiness reviews to represent the support perspective.
- Serve as a subject matter expert (SME) in one or more technical domains.
Role Requirements (Must-Have Skills)
- Solid understanding of Zero Trust principles and technologies such as:
- Identity and Access Management
- Endpoint Detection & Response
- Network Security / Microsegmentation
- Secure Web Gateway / Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB)
- 3-5 years of technical troubleshooting experience, preferably in technical support or system reliability engineering
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills, ability to disseminate clear and appropriate information to both business and technical audiences
- Able to manage multiple priorities, commitments, and projects
- You understand and have previous experience working with Identity and Access Management protocols and technologies (SSO, SAML, OAuth, Federation, SCIM, etc.)
- You understand and have previous experience supporting and troubleshooting multi-factor mechanisms (TOTP, SMS, FIDO, U2F, WebAuth, EMAIL, Push MFA, etc).
Core competencies (“Desired skills, knowledge and experience”)
- Extensive technical support experience
- Expertise in troubleshooting application protocols (L7 - DNS, HTTP, etc)
- Expertise in troubleshooting network infrastructure (L3/L4)
- Expert with Linux command line tools (curl, dig, git, traceroute, mtr)
- Expert at analyzing data using tools like grafana, kibana, and SQL
- Able to clarify complex technical issues and coordinate efforts to resolve
- Able to identify and share/suggest process improvements
- Demonstrated leadership, prior mentoring experience
- Self-motivated, self-directed, strong relationship building, can positively influence the actions of others, team player
- Comfortable handling inbound and outbound customer calls
Bonus Points
- You are familiar with Cloudflare Zero Trust products (Zero Trust / Access / Gateway / Tunnel, WARP client) and have a site actively using our platform
- You have a solid grasp of problem-solving with command line tools (dig / traceroute / curl / tcpdump)
- Familiarity with troubleshooting Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems
- You are familiar with Apache, Nginx, IIS, and other web servers
- You have worked with PostgreSQL, MySQL, MS SQL or other database servers
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!
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.