Principal Customer Engineer, Central Majors - Toronto Canada

The Customer Engineer (CE) is the core driver of our technical go-to-market strategy: a trusted technical advisor and primary architect of the customer journey. You will bridge the gap between technical strategy and business value—guiding enterprise clients from initial pre-sales technical validation through onboarding, deployment architecture, and full lifecycle expansion. Sitting within the GTM organization and reporting to a Customer Engineering Leader, you will not hand off your customers once an initial agreement is reached. Instead, you will operate as a quota-carrying technologist, leveraging AI-augmented workflows to eliminate administrative toil so you can focus on high-value architectural design and driving measurable business outcomes across the entire customer journey.

• Technical Validation: Partner closely with Account Executives to lead technical deep-dive discovery, capture business requirements, and map complex customer infrastructure - DNS, CDN, Zero Trust, Network Security, Workers - to fit-for-purpose Cloudflare architectures and bespoke solutions. . Define, scope, success criteria, and technical evaluations plans for Proof of Concepts (PoCs) and Technical Validations. Deliver tailored technical presentations, architectural diagrams, and demonstrations that show how Cloudflare solves specific performance, security, and reliability challenges. Proactively address complex technical objections, security compliance questions, and edge-case architectural requirements during the sales cycle. Take accountability for a suitable solution deployment strategy (Customer, Partner or Cloudflare Professional services) being an integral part of all proposals.
• Customer Adoption & Value Realization: Provide oversight to technical onboarding and implementation, but not execute the implementation, serving as the primary executive and engineering contact for the customer. Design structured migration and onboarding blueprints tailored to the customer’s environment (e.g. DNS migrations, Zero Trust rollouts, WAF tuning guidance), and act as the lead consultant for customer engineering teams, walking them step-by-step through configuration best practices. Partner with Account Executives to own discovery, demos, onboarding, technical health, risk, and expansion strategy. Proactively monitor customer health scores and telemetry to ensure rapid time-to-value, resolve integration bottlenecks, and reduce deployment risk.
• Carry a variable quota tied directly to new business acquisition and/or ongoing account growth. Be commercially accountable for ensuring deep platform adoption, retaining revenue, and identifying strategic cross-sell and up-sell opportunities based on product usage data. Lead technical Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) to translate platform capabilities into return on investment for C-level executives.
• Trusted Advisory: Act as a trusted technical advisor throughout the entire customer lifecycle, maintaining a continuous, deep relationship with key stakeholders from initial onboarding through maturity, renewal, and expansion. Provide thought partnership on architecture, AI control layers, security posture, and deployment confidence. Identify potential deployment risks or integration bottlenecks early, and provide remediation strategies to de-risk customer outcomes.
• AI Orchestration & Workflow Automation: Leverage AI agents, Large Language Models (LLMs), and internal platforms to automate routine tasks such as RFP/Security Questionnaire responses, sandbox provisioning, basic telemetry monitoring, and internal/external documentation, reclaiming your time for strategic customer advisory.