Description
About Us
At Cloudflare, we're 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.
We protect and accelerate 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.
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.
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.
Requirements
- 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)