Senior Director of Escalation Engineering

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:  Lisbon, Portugal;  London, UK;  Austin, TX;  San Francisco, CA

About the Department

The Cloudflare Customer Support Team solves complicated problems and answers technical inquiries via phone, email, chat, and social media. Whether it is a blogger using our free services or a global 2000, large enterprise business with petabytes of web traffic, our team is always eager to assist. At Cloudflare, our Global Customer Support organization works directly with customers to ensure a world-class level of technical support for all our products and services. 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.

What you'll do

The Senior Director of Escalation Engineering will manage the highly technical Escalation Engineering team in Support, a global team that performs deep, technical troubleshooting for complex, escalated issues. This role owns the standard customer escalation process, critical escalation flows, escalation metrics and tracking, and works with all Product and Engineering teams to identify product bugs, network problems, and platform issues. Their global team acts as an escalation point and owner for many escalations per month: isolates, replicates and resolves problems while making the product and company better based on their learnings.

As the leader of our Escalation Engineering (EE) team, you will manage the global level 3/4 EE team and have direct input on improving all of our escalation processes including customer escalations, executive escalations, and monitored accounts. You will be responsible for ensuring the success of our customers by investing in the development of highly productive Escalation Engineers, highly efficient processes, and world-class tools and services. In addition you are part of the Support organization’s senior leadership team building strategy to provide our customers an outstanding customer experience.  You will bring strong relationship-building experience, deep technical and product knowledge, project management and organizational skills, as well as a high degree of empathy to ensure all customers’ satisfaction with Cloudflare’s services. 

Your responsibilities will include:

• Be the senior executive representative for the EE organization globally, both externally with customers and internally between various functions such as sales, solutions engineering, customer success, product and engineering.
• You will work directly with Product & Engineering to drive product improvements discovered by your team
• You have excellent communication skills and are able to present in front of audiences of various sizes and interests.
• You understand the fundamental technologies involved with the Internet, and the value proposition of Cloudflare’s products.
• Can handle complex and high-impact escalations involving various internal and external stakeholders.
• Able to develop and articulate a strategic vision for providing the world’s best customer support within the region, taking into account geography, languages, and country-specific technical challenges.  
• Can execute against short-term goals and long-term vision.  
• Understands the operational aspects of running a large, complex, fast-moving support team. This includes the entire lifecycle of a support issue, the various channels of engagements, understanding how issues are triaged based on impact and radius, being able to meet response SLAs, finding the shortest path to issue resolution, escalation handling when needed, and ultimately driving successful outcomes which result in high customer satisfaction.
• Deep understanding of important KPIs, how to use metrics to surface problem areas, and take necessary actions to improve lagging KPIs.
• You are a great people manager and motivator, including performance coaching, career development and hiring the best people across the region.
• Establish and track key performance metrics to evaluate team performance and identify areas for improvement.
• Act as a point of escalation for complex customer issues, working closely with internal teams to ensure timely resolution.
• Foster a culture of continuous learning and development within the customer support team.
• Understands change management principles in order to align various perspectives within the team, and then executing against needed change.
• Stay informed about industry trends and best practices in customer support

Examples of desirable skills, knowledge and experience:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Business, or a related field
• 8+ years of experience in management of technical support managers and teams in the technology industry.
• Proven leader and motivator with deep experience building and leading growing customer support organization
• Experience serving in a Cloud Service Platform, Security and Networking company will be a huge plus
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to build strong relationships with customers and internal stakeholders.
• Proven track record of driving customer success and achieving business outcomes.
• Experience working with cross-functional teams to deliver solutions that meet customer needs.
• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, dynamic environment and adapt to changing priorities.

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: We equip politically and artistically important organizations and journalists 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: We created 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.

1.1.1.1: We released 1.1.1.1 to help fix the foundation of the Internet by building a faster, more secure and privacy-centric public DNS resolver. This is available publicly for everyone to use - it is the first consumer-focused service Cloudflare has ever released. Here’s the deal - we don’t store client IP addresses never, ever. We will continue to abide by our privacy commitment and ensure that no user data is sold to advertisers or used to target consumers.

Sound like something you’d like to be a part of? We’d love to hear from you!

This position may require access to information protected under U.S. export control laws, including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations. Please note that any offer of employment may be conditioned on your authorization to receive software or technology controlled under these U.S. export laws without sponsorship for an export license.

Cloudflare is proud to be an equal opportunity employer.  We are committed to providing equal employment opportunity for all people and place great value in both diversity and inclusiveness.  All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to their, or any other person's, perceived or actual race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, family care status, or any other basis protected by law. We are an AA/Veterans/Disabled Employer.

Cloudflare provides reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities.  Please tell us if you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job. Examples of reasonable accommodations include, but are not limited to, changing the application process, providing documents in an alternate format, using a sign language interpreter, or using specialized equipment.  If you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job, please contact us via e-mail at hr@cloudflare.com or via mail at 101 Townsend St. San Francisco, CA 94107.