Escalation Engineer, CDN/Developer Platform

Job Location: Austin, TX
About the Department
The Customer Support Team solves complicated problems and answers technical inquiries via phone, email, chat, and social media. Whether it is a WordPress blogger using our services for free or a global Enterprise business with petabytes of web traffic, our team is always eager to assist. We are the eyes and ears of Cloudflare, acting as the real-time voice of the customer to help communicate their needs and real-world use cases back to the rest of the company - to help build a better service and future product development.
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. Escalation Engineers lead deep technical investigations across the full stack, isolate and reproduce defects, and ensure accurate, timely communication throughout the escalation lifecycle. While they collaborate with Engineering and Product teams as needed, their primary focus is empowering the support organization, improving customer reliability, and driving high-quality outcomes for escalated customers. They contribute critical insights, document new knowledge, and help shape processes and readiness that strengthen the overall support experience.
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.
• 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

• Minimum of 3 years' hands-on experience supporting or engineering Application/Developer focused products.
• Web Technologies: In-depth understanding of HTTP/S, RESTful APIs, and common web frameworks.
• Front-end Performance: Knowledge of browser rendering, DOM manipulation, and optimization techniques for client-side applications.
• Back-end Performance: Familiarity with server-side architecture, database interactions, and API performance tuning.
• Developer Tools: Proficiency with tools like Chrome DevTools, curl, and IDE debuggers for diagnosing application issues.
• Cloud Platforms: Understanding of cloud-native architectures, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and serverless functions.
• Observability: Experience with monitoring, logging, and tracing tools (e.g. Sentry, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack, Jaeger) for application health and performance.
• Security Principles: Awareness of common application vulnerabilities (OWASP Top 10), secure coding practices, and API security.
• Developer Experience: Appreciation for developer workflows, SDKs, and API documentation.
• Performance Optimization: Knowledge of caching strategies, CDN concepts, and load balancing.
• Proficiency in application troubleshooting using profiling and tracing tools (e.g., Dynatrace, New Relic, OpenTelemetry).
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to convey technical information clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Demonstrated ability to manage multiple priorities and projects effectively in a fast-paced environment.

Core competencies ("Desired skills, knowledge and experience")

• Extensive technical support experience
• Expertise in troubleshooting application protocols (L7 - DNS, HTTP, etc)
• Expertise in troubleshooting network infrastructure (L3/L4)
• Expert with Linux command line tools (curl, dig, git, traceroute, mtr)
• Expert at analyzing data using tools like grafana, kibana, and SQL
• Able to clarify complex technical issues and coordinate efforts to resolve
• Able to identify and share/suggest process improvements
• Demonstrated leadership, prior mentoring experience
• Self-motivated, self-directed, strong relationship building, can positively influence the actions of others, team player
• Comfortable handling inbound and outbound customer calls

Bonus Points

• You are familiar with Cloudflare and are actively using our platform
• Experience with regular expressions
• Knowledge of web programming (HTML, Javascript, PHP) and scripting (bash, Python)
• Experience managing/configuring non-HTTP applications (email, DNS, FTP, SSH, etc.)

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