Senior Engineering Director

Available Locations: Austin, TX
About the Role
As the Director of Engineering: Enterprise Platform, you will lead the engineering efforts behind Cloudflare's dashboard ,with a central focus on developing and enhancing Cloudflare's control plane. You will play a central role in helping Cloudflare grow 5x over the next 5 years. Alongside your Product Management counterparts, your mission is to enhance customer and prospect engagement with our products and the company as a whole. You'll tackle challenges such as:

• Platform for Large Customers: The Enterprise Platform Team provides a powerful platform to deliver exceptional user experiences for large customers. This includes building and maintaining systems that empower Cloudflare's customers to use features like API & SDK (including Terraform), Authentication and Authorization (SCIM, RBAC, SSO, 2FA), Configuration Management and Data Localization . The team also delivers an internal developer experience at scale, empowering Cloudflare's product teams to leverage the platform's capabilities..
• API Platform and SDKs: The team manages all API services, SDKs, the API Gateway, and associated tooling that customers use to configure and monitor Cloudflare.
• Domain and Configuration Management: You will lead the development of the platform and product features for Domain Management and Config Management (Config Sharing, Versioning, Localization), ensuring a robust and intuitive experience for customers.
• Identity and Access Management: The Enterprise Platform Team owns and maintains the services and APIs that manage customer's Cloudflare Access Policy and Authentication mechanisms for Cloudflare's APIs.
• Organization and Partner Management: The team manages the systems and APIs customers use to define and manage their organization and accounts.

In this role, you'll lead a team of engineering managers and engineers, collaborating closely with product management, design, and go-to-market teams. You'll also work with product teams across the company to address these challenges. Additionally, you'll be responsible for fostering a high-performance culture within your team and promoting engineering excellence throughout Cloudflare.
Key Responsibilities

• Leadership and Accountability
• Lead by example, setting high standards for ethics and integrity.
• Develop leaders within your organization who have their own track records of success.
• Delivery and Execution
• Drive goal-setting initiatives and take individual ownership of key objectives, including cross-functional projects.
• Ensure regular progress updates are shared with peers, executives, and other stakeholders.
• Validate team-level goals for appropriate stretch and impact, making adjustments as needed.
• Monitor delivery across teams, unblocking obstacles to maintain progress.
• Address underperforming teams by implementing necessary changes.
• Strategic Thinking and Vision
• Break down ambiguous problems into concrete goals with clear outcomes.
• Set a common direction and strategy across teams, creating cohesion around the mission.
• Identify opportunities to leverage existing skills, tools, and technologies to accelerate delivery and minimize waste.
• Develop a vision for the future of your area and inspire collaboration among other leaders.
• Technical Excellence
• Use your engineering expertise to identify improvement opportunities, enhancing product quality and development velocity.
• Work with engineering managers and principal engineers to implement best practices.
• Ensure quantitative measures exist for teams, using data to identify issues and take corrective action.
• Stay informed about modern UX stacks and web technologies to effectively lead technical discussions.
• Ensure the operational maturity of the platform and services. You will be directly responsible for defining and maintaining the Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Service Level Indicators (SLIs) for the Cloudflare API at scale.
• Customer Focus
• Deeply understand customer problems by analyzing support themes, engaging with customer-facing teams, and interacting with customers directly.
• Develop strategies to serve the needs of customers who primarily use APIs or Terraform.

Key Competencies

• Leadership Skills
• Proven ability to lead and develop high-performing teams in a dynamic environment.
• Experience reorganizing teams to improve success and adapt to changing goals.
• Execution Excellence
• Strong track record of managing competing priorities and ensuring critical tasks are completed.
• Ability to break down complex problems and drive continuous, iterative progress.
• Influence and Communication
• Exceptional communication skills, capable of persuading and influencing cross-functional teams.
• Ability to articulate a clear vision and inspire others to collaborate.
• Technical Proficiency
• Deep understanding of modern UX stacks and web technologies.
• Engineering background preferred; ability to engage credibly with technical teams.
• Data-Driven Decision Making
• Fluent in working directly with data to inform decisions and persuade stakeholders.
• Ability to define and track key metrics to measure progress and impact.

Bonus Points

• Platform Mindset and Internet Expertise
• Understanding of how the Internet works at layers 2 through 7, or mastery in a similarly complex domain.
• Use a platform mindset to abstract complexity associated with building foundational tools that empower other engineering teams to leverage this expertise without needing to be specialists themselves.
• Experience managing requirements from both internal and external stakeholders.
• Hands-On Experience
• Experience developing web properties or contributing to open-source projects.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience
• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, with experience leading multiple managers and organizations larger than 30 people.
• Demonstrated excellence in building public-facing UX in an enterprise setting.
• Proven track record of driving organizational excellence and making tough decisions when necessary.