Senior Customer Engineer, Strategic - Seattle, WA

Description

The company runs one of the largest networks in the world, serving millions of websites and Internet properties, from individual bloggers and small businesses to Fortune 500 firms.

It protects and speeds up any Internet application without new hardware, new software, or code changes. Traffic runs through its global network, and customers typically see better performance and fewer spam messages and attacks.

The role sits in the go-to-market organization and reports to a Customer Engineering Leader. You stay with each customer after the contract is signed rather than handing them off, so you act as a quota-carrying technologist.

The team values curiosity over bureaucracy, and it treats AI as a working partner for hard problems. It builds on rapid iteration and shares every improvement across the team.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical discovery with Account Executives, gather business requirements, and map customer infrastructure (DNS, CDN, Zero Trust, network security, Workers) to suitable architectures and custom solutions.
• Define the scope, success criteria, and evaluation plans for proofs of concept and technical validations.
• Build tailored presentations, architecture diagrams, and demos that show how the platform solves specific performance, security, and reliability problems.
• Address technical objections, security compliance questions, and unusual architecture requirements during the sales cycle.
• Set the deployment strategy for every proposal, choosing between customer, partner, or the company's professional services teams.
• Oversee onboarding and implementation without doing the work yourself. Act as the main executive and engineering contact, design migration plans such as DNS moves, Zero Trust rollouts, and WAF tuning, and walk customer engineers through configuration best practices step by step.
• Track customer health scores and telemetry, shorten time to value, remove integration blockers, and lower deployment risk.
• Carry a variable quota tied to new business, account growth, or both. Drive deep platform adoption, protect revenue, and find cross-sell and up-sell chances in product usage data.
• Lead technical quarterly business reviews that explain the return on investment of the platform to C-level executives.
• Serve as a trusted technical advisor through onboarding, maturity, renewal, and expansion on architecture, AI control layers, and security posture. Spot deployment risks early and propose ways to reduce them.
• Use AI agents, large language models, and internal tools to automate RFP and security questionnaire responses, sandbox provisioning, basic telemetry monitoring, and documentation.
• Work with the Enablement Team to create SOPs, architecture best practices, and technical guides for internal teams and customers.

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. Required years vary by level (Associate, Senior, Staff, or Principal).
• Ability to whiteboard, design, and clearly explain complex enterprise network and security architectures.
• Strong communication skills for turning technical detail into business outcomes, for both hands-on engineers and C-level executives.
• A proven record in a quota-carrying or revenue-focused role, with a solid grasp of SaaS metrics, business value, and enterprise sales cycles.
• Strong presentation and stakeholder management skills, bridging deep implementation details and high-level C-suite strategy.
• Depth in at least four of these areas: Internet fundamentals (OSI layers 1 to 7, BGP, GRE, TCP/UDP, authoritative and recursive DNS, HTTP(S), SSL/TLS); security (WAF, bot management, firewalls, rate limiting, (M)TLS, Zero Trust, SASE); performance (speed, latency, caching, video streaming, HTTP/2, TLS 1.3); AI proficiency (prompt engineering, AI-assisted scripting and log analysis, LLM use, workflow automation); coding and scripting (Python, JavaScript, Bash, Lua, Go, or similar) for integrations, API connectors, and edge functions; developer platform fluency (RESTful and GraphQL APIs, SDKs, webhooks, infrastructure-as-code such as Terraform or Pulumi, CI/CD, observability).
• An undergraduate or graduate degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field.
• Good-to-have: a record of building technical enablement such as workshops, code samples, documentation, or developer onboarding that speeds up adoption of complex platforms.
• Good-to-have: experience with LLM orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architectures, and model access controls.
• Good-to-have: understanding of regulations such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, and SOC 2.
• Good-to-have: a background at a hyperscaler, digital native, distributed systems team, or startup, which is valued for deeper cloud skills and architecture depth.

Conditions

Location: Seattle, WA.

Base salary is competitive, with variable pay linked to full-lifecycle commercial targets such as new business, adoption milestones, and account expansion.

The role is eligible for incentive pay under the Sales Compensation Plan. The estimated annual salary range for Washington, $204,000.00 to $321,000.00, includes on-target incentive pay.

The role is eligible to take part in the company's equity plan.

Travel of 20% to 50% may be required for customer meetings, conferences, industry events, and in-person team work.

Candidates who reach the offer stage may be asked to attend an in-person interview at a company office or hub.

The role may involve information controlled under U.S. export laws, including the Export Administration Regulations. Any offer may depend on your authorization to receive that technology without sponsorship for an export license.

Benefits

• Medical, prescription, dental, and vision insurance.
• Flexible spending accounts, commuter spending accounts, and fertility and family-forming benefits.
• On-demand mental health support and an Employee Assistance Program.
• Global travel medical insurance.
• Short- and long-term disability insurance, plus life and accident insurance.
• 401(k) retirement savings plan and an employee stock participation plan.
• Flexible paid time off that covers vacation and sick leave.
• Leave programs for parental, pregnancy health, medical, and bereavement needs.
• Benefits for employees outside the U.S. may differ.