Senior Network Engineer

We are looking for a Senior Network Engineer to join our Edge Network & Backbone team — someone who brings deep operational experience, an AI-first mindset, and the instinct to mentor and lift the engineers around them. In your first year, this role is deliberately hands-on: you'll be in the operational trenches, owning complex faults, driving capacity work, and setting the standard for how we run the network. Beyond that, you'll help shape how the team works — building AI-enabled tooling and agents that reduce toil, accelerate troubleshooting, and make the whole team more effective. This is a North American based role, but you'll be joining one global team: the sun never sets on Cloudflare, and our engineers hand off work across every time zone to keep the network running around the clock. Responsibilities Own the technical operation, engineering, and architecture of Cloudflare's global network, including planning, installation, and day-to-day management of hardware and software across the edge and backbone. Serve as a hands-on operational anchor for the team — diagnosing and resolving complex network faults, owning incident response end-to-end including on-call rotation, and contributing to post-incident reviews to drive continuous improvement. Build production AI agents for network operations. Design, ship, and own LLM-powered tools that integrate with our operational systems of record via tool calling. Ship them with evals, observability of agent decisions, cost tracking, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints where autonomous action carries blast radius. Apply AI to accelerate troubleshooting. Use and extend our internal AI platform (Workers AI, AI Gateway) to speed up root cause analysis, pattern recognition across faults, and operational decision-making under pressure. Architect network improvements that lower latency, reduce packet loss, and increase scale — optimising end user experience across Cloudflare's global infrastructure. Mentor and develop junior engineers on the team, setting technical standards, conducting structured troubleshooting sessions, and building a culture of operational excellence and continuous learning. Collaborate with internal teams on cross-functional network projects, contributing to design documentation, SOPs, and knowledge base articles that outlast any individual contributor. Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience Proven track record in large-scale network engineering and operations. Proficiency in Python and/or TypeScript and/or Go sufficient to build, debug, and maintain agent code, not just to glue scripts together. Working knowledge of agent integration patterns: function/tool calling, MCP or equivalent, retrieval over operational corpora (runbooks, postmortems, change history), and prompt iteration with evals. Experience reasoning about agent failure modes in production: hallucination guards, fallback paths, rollback, blast-radius control. Deep expertise in BGP and anycast routing, with the ability to diagnose and resolve complex routing issues in a production environment. Strong understanding of MPLS and Segment Routing. Proficiency across multiple network vendor operating systems (Juniper, Cisco, Arista, or similar). Experience with network automation frameworks such as SaltStack, Ansible, or equivalent, and a strong instinct for solving operational problems through code. Ability to prioritise effectively and lead calmly when faced with high-pressure scenarios. An effective communicator who can adapt their style to any audience — whether guiding a junior engineer through a fault or presenting a network architecture decision to senior leadership. Bonus Points Shipped LLM-powered tooling into production use by a team other than your own, with measurable operational impact. Professional-level network certification (JNCIP, CCNP, or equivalent or higher). Experience with optical transport technologies such as CWDM and DWDM. Linux system administration. Experience writing network configuration and design documentation at an architectural level. Compensation Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location. For Colorado based hires: Estimated annual salary of $168,000 - $231,000 Washington, based hires: Estimated annual salary of $172,000 - $237,000. Equity This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare's equity plan. Benefits Cloudflare offers a complete package of benefits and programs to support you and your family. Our benefits programs can help you pay health care expenses, support caregiving, build capital for the future and make life a little easier and fun! The below is a description of our benefits for employees in the United States, and benefits may vary for employees based outside the U.S. 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 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 prot