# Engineering Manager, Data Center Operations

**Company**: Cloudflare
**Location**: Hybrid
**Work arrangement**: hybrid
**Experience**: senior
**Job type**: full-time
**Category**: Engineering
**Industry**: Technology

**Apply**: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/cloudflare/jobs/8293647?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_81672bea-cda

## Description

## About the Role

We're looking for an experienced Data Center Operations manager to build and run the team that brings new sites online and keeps them running around the clock. You will build a distributed team of Data Center Engineers from the ground up. You'll own sites across their full lifecycle: delivering greenfield builds through third-party vendors and colocation partners, running them in production, and retiring hardware securely at end of life.

## Responsibilities

### Team Leadership

- Hire, develop and manage Data Center Engineers based on-site at data centers across the US.

- Set clear expectations, career paths and a culture of ownership across a team spread over many sites.

- Build and take part in a 24x7 on-call rotation with your team.

- Define coverage models, handover protocols and incident SLAs that hold up as the footprint grows.

- Serve as the escalation point for on-site incidents.

### Site Delivery

- Own build timelines from site readiness through hardware delivery, rack-and-stack, cabling, validation and handoff to production.

- Run greenfield builds as multi-workstream programs.

- Coordinate third-party integrators, contractors and colocation providers to hit dates without cutting corners.

### Production Operations

- Be accountable for availability targets for production hardware at your sites.

- Run break/fix, repairs, RMAs and spares strategy so that availability is measured, reported and improving.

- Manage colocation providers and vendors day to day: escalations, remote-hands quality, power and cooling issues, and performance against contractual commitments.

### Documentation and DCIM

- Make sure every site is fully documented in DCIM from day one.

- Treat infrastructure records as a source of truth that both operations and dependent teams rely on.

### Decommissioning and Hardware Lifecycle

- Own on-site decommissioning end to end: unracking, physical collections, serial number verification, chain of custody, and handoff for secure destruction.

- Partner with vendor management on IT asset disposition (ITAD) vendors.

### Security and Compliance

- Make sure your sites and team meet Cloudflare's physical security, access control, chain-of-custody and compliance obligations.

- Follow established physical access procedures, and work with security and compliance teams to develop new ones where these sites need them.

### Automation and Operational Efficiency

- Find manual, repetitive work in build, break/fix, decommissioning and evidence collection.

- Influence tooling and automation teams to remove it.

### Business Reporting

- Own weekly business reviews and monthly and quarterly reporting on availability, build progress, incidents and operational health to the Director and peer leaders.

## Requirements

- 6+ years in data center operations, including 3+ years directly managing on-site technical teams.

- A track record of operating multi-site data center fleets at hyperscale or large-cloud scale.

- Hands-on experience with IT hardware, including servers, network devices, optics and cabling.

- Strong Layer 1 and Layer 2 fundamentals: structured cabling, fiber and optics, patching standards, switching basics, and troubleshooting physical connectivity for network and server hardware.

- Solid knowledge of data center power and cooling, rack design, high-density deployments and hardware lifecycle management.

- Strong understanding of DCIM and asset management systems.

- Working knowledge of the security and compliance frameworks common in enterprise-grade data centers.

- Strong program management skills across multiple vendors, sites and time-bound workstreams.

- Excellent written and verbal communication, including regular business reviews and status, risk and availability reporting to leadership.

## Preferred Qualifications

- Experience standing up a new data center operations function or region from zero.

- Background at a hyperscaler, cloud provider, major CDN or similarly fast-scaling infrastructure company.

- Experience with ITAD vendor programs and secure destruction requirements.

- Experience with PagerDuty or similar on-call and incident tooling.

- Familiarity with DCIM and source-of-truth tooling such as NetBox or Nlyte, Jira-based operational workflows, and Confluence documentation practices.

## Skills

### Required
- data center operations
- team management
- hardware experience
- Layer 1 and Layer 2 fundamentals
- DCIM
- asset management
- security and compliance
- program management
- communication

### Nice to have
- hyperscaler
- cloud provider
- CDN
- ITAD vendor programs
- PagerDuty
- NetBox
- Nlyte
- Jira
- Confluence

---

Source: [Apply at job-boards.greenhouse.io](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/cloudflare/jobs/8293647?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply)