Senior Solutions Engineer, Majors - Chicago

About Us

At Cloudflare, we are on a mission to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world’s largest networks that powers millions of websites and other Internet properties for customers ranging from individual bloggers to SMBs to Fortune 500 companies. Cloudflare protects and accelerates any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. Internet properties powered by Cloudflare all have web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with every request. As a result, they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. Cloudflare was named to Entrepreneur Magazine’s Top Company Cultures list and ranked among the World’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company.

We realize people do not fit into neat boxes. We are looking for curious and empathetic individuals who are committed to developing themselves and learning new skills, and we are ready to help you do that. We cannot complete our mission without building a diverse and inclusive team. We hire the best people based on an evaluation of their potential and support them throughout their time at Cloudflare. Come join us!

Available locations: Chicago

What you'll do as a Solutions Engineer, Strategic Accounts

The Solution Engineering organization is responsible for the technical sale of the Cloudflare solution portfolio, ensuring maximal business value, fit-for-purpose solution design and adoption roadmap for our customers.

Reporting to the Solution Engineering manager the Strategic Accounts Solutions Engineer is a Senior level role. You are a customer facing technologist within the Cloudflare Solutions Engineering team. You have strong experience in large account pre-sales management as well as excellent verbal and written communications skills suited for executive-level engagement. You are comfortable speaking about the Cloudflare vision and mission with C-level customer executives.Your role will be to build passionate champions within the technology ranks at your accounts, drive sales for identified opportunities, and leverage your relationships with these technical champions to build a revenue pipeline where no opportunities yet exist.

You will work within a high-profile pursuit team dedicated to certain strategic accounts, working closely with the strategic account executives attached to these accounts.

Specifically, we are looking for you to:

• Build and maintain long term technical relationships with the technical buyers (executives, managers and individual contributors) at your assigned accounts, becoming a trusted advisor to those stakeholders.
• Deeply understand the business-critical issues that your accounts are facing, and provide meaningful solution designs to facilitate technical validation of Cloudflare as a part of the customer’s infrastructure, including the coordination of Cloudflare colleagues throughout the sales and procurement cycle.
• Identify and drive technical conversations in every possible line of business within the accounts, engaging key technical buyers with the purpose of uncovering new areas of potential revenue & showing value to all possible parts of your accounts.
• Empower customers in their security and network transformation journeys, helping them to define strategies and architect necessary security controls aligned with Cloudflare product suites.
• Be the voice of the customer internally at Cloudflare, engaging with and influencing Cloudflare’s Product and Engineering teams to meet your customers’ needs.
• Represent and evangelize Cloudflare externally at Developer, Community, Technology, Cybersecurity and other industry events with thought leadership and expertise.

Examples of desirable skills, knowledge and experience

• Polished communication and executive presentation skills with ability to drive a discussion with a broad range of stakeholders (from the web developer to the CISO).
• Relationship building: a proven track record of building deep technical relationships with engineers and senior executives in large and strategic accounts. Experience in managing various stakeholder relationships to build consensus on security solutions/projects.
• Experience managing technical sales within large accounts.
• Developing champion-style relationships
• Driving technical wins
• Assisting with technical validation
• A deep understanding of core industry components of Cloudflare solutions (and a desire to learn more):
• Internet security technologies including DDoS and DDoS mitigation, Firewalls, TLS, VPN, DLP
• Networking technologies including TCP, UDP, DNS, IPv4 + IPv6, BGP routing, GRE, SD-WAN, MPLS, Global Traffic Management
• HTTP technologies including reverse proxy (e.g., WAF and CDN), forward proxy (secure web gateway), serverless application development
• Zero-trust network access (ZTNA & SASE) concepts including identity management and authentication
• Cloud computing technologies such as AWS, GCP, Azure and others
• Some scripting or programming experience with one or more of JavaScript, Python, Golang, BASH
• Understanding of, or experience with, regulatory requirements such as FedRAMP, GDPR, PCI DSS, HIPAA, SOC-2, ISO/IEC.

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 protection and reliability for free, so that their constituents have access to election information and voter registration. Since the project, we've provided services to more than 425 local governm...