Senior Solutions Engineering Manager, Named - North California

As a Senior Solutions Engineering Manager for US Named Accounts at Cloudflare, you will lead a high-performing, geographically distributed team of Solutions Engineers partnering with our most strategic enterprise clients.

You will work side-by-side with Enterprise Sales directors, Product Management, Engineering, and Customer Support to drive full-sales lifecycle technical activities and secure revenue targets.

We are looking for an empathetic leader with an AI-native curiosity to streamline workflows and a player-coach mindset who isn't afraid to roll up their sleeves and dive into the technical details.

Ultimately, you will foster a collaborative, transparent team culture dedicated to turning complex edge security, performance, and serverless challenges into scalable customer successes that help build a better Internet.

Responsibilities

• Lead and Scale the US Named Team: Oversee the hiring, technical onboarding, continuous enablement, and pre-sales performance of a highly skilled team of Enterprise Solutions Engineers across the United States.
• Drive Strategic Revenue Goals: Partner directly with Named Account Sales Executives and leadership to effectively manage complex sales cycles, coordinate technical proof activities (PoCs), and accurately forecast pipeline progression.
• Shadow and Coach Technical Fieldwork: Step into the field as a player-coach to shadow customer engagements, establish technical best practices, and guide your team in breaking down complex concepts into digestible business value.
• Champion Cross-Functional Alignment: Build deep operational relationships with Cloudflare's core Product, Engineering, Customer Success, and Support teams to establish reliable escalation pathways and accelerate feature request implementations for top-tier accounts.
• Facilitate Hive-Mind Knowledge Sharing: Cultivate internal communication channels to ensure scalable technical solutions, architectural frameworks, and unique team discoveries are seamlessly shared across regional SE teams to prevent repeating mistakes.
• Manage Team Health and Morale: Keep a constant pulse on your team's individual capacity, strengths, and career development goals, maintaining an open environment where transparent feedback and critical insights are actively welcomed.
• Driving Enterprise Adoption: Accelerating the sales cycle by helping customers move past "AI hype" into production-ready, high-ROI use cases.
• Technical Excellence: Building a team that is viewed by customers not just as vendors, but as trusted consultants with thorough understanding of AI and how Cloudflare can be positioned to help.

Requirements

Must-Have Skills

• Proven Technical Leadership: Minimum of 5+ years of experience directly managing and scaling a pre-sales Solutions Engineering team, coupled with 10+ years of related technology industry experience.
• Enterprise Pre-Sales Track Record: A documented history of success driving technical pre-sales within the US Enterprise or Named Accounts market, showing strong alignment with sales methodologies like MEDDPICC.
• Deep Architectural Expertise: Strong foundational knowledge of fundamental Internet protocols and cloud architectures, including OSI Model layers 1-7, DNS, BGP, TCP/IP, and SSL/TLS.
• Communication: Exceptional ability to demystify complex AI concepts (like fine-tuning vs. RAG, or compute costs) for C-level executives, while remaining highly technical with data scientists.
• Oversee the design and delivery of high-impact technical validation events (custom demos, hackathons, and scoped PoCs).
• Ensure solutions adhere to enterprise-grade standards regarding AI ethics, data privacy, governance, and latency/cost optimization.
• Customer Lifecycle: Clear understanding of the entire customer lifecycle management and ensure the team is properly aligned.
• Cross-Functional Influence: Demonstrated operational and analytical skills required to influence matrixed organizations, handle critical customer escalations, and manage distributed team resources effectively.
• AI/ML Expertise: Proven, hands-on experience with AI/ML frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow), LLM orchestration tools (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex), vector databases, and MLOps pipelines.
• Cloud & Architecture: Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and how to deploy scalable AI workloads.

Nice-to-Have Skills

• Advanced Portfolio Exposure: Familiarity with modern, emerging technical landscapes such as Zero Trust security architectures, serverless computing (Workers), and post-quantum cryptography.
• Diverse Domain Background: Prior foundational experience working across overlapping technical disciplines like software engineering, product management, financial consulting, or enterprise project delivery.
• Serve as the subject matter expert on Generative AI, Large Language Models (LLMs), MLOps, and data architecture.

Benefits

Cloudflare offers a complete package of benefits and programs to support you and your family.

• Health & Welfare Benefits:
• Medical/Rx Insurance
• Dental Insurance
• Vision Insurance
• Flexible Spending Accounts
• Commuter Spending Accounts
• Fertility & Family Forming Benefits
• On-demand mental health support and Employee Assistance Program
• Global Travel Medical Insurance
• Financial Benefits:
• Short and Long Term Disability Insurance
• Life & Accident Insurance
• 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan
• Employee Stock Participation Plan
• Time Off:
• Flexible paid time off covering vacation and sick leave
• Leave programs, including parental, pregnancy health, medical, and bereavement leave