Braun Board

Senior Customer Engineer (Pre-sales), East China

Cloudflare · Remote · US

Base
Not disclosed
OTE
Not disclosed
Posted
1mo ago

Still open · checked 2h agoon Cloudflare's careers page

What Cloudflare sells

Speeds up websites and cuts spam and attacks

A small online shop wants its website to load fast and stay safe from spam and attackers, but it cannot add new equipment or rewrite its code. Cloudflare sends the shop's web traffic through its large global network, which speeds up the site and cuts down on spam and attacks. The website runs faster and sees fewer attacks, with nothing new to install.

In plain English, from their own job posts. Something wrong? Tell us

More Security companies →

The Braun Read

Ask hard questions

Too much is left unsaid. Make them answer before you invest.

Pay
No pay listed at all.
Transparency
Shares 1 of 5: quota, attainment, deal size, territory, sales cycle.
Pipeline
Doesn't say where pipeline comes from. Ask.
Time on market
Open 37 days. Normal, but not fresh.
Company hiring
23 sales roles open, hiring at a steady pace.

Based only on what the posting says. Flags are a starting point for your first call, not a final judgment.

Questions to ask on the first call

Built from what this posting leaves out. How they answer tells you as much as what they say.

  1. 1.

    What percentage of fully ramped reps hit quota last year?

    OTE is what you could earn. This is how likely you are to earn it.

  2. 2.

    What are the base and the OTE for this role?

    No point investing hours before you know the number.

  3. 3.

    Who's the economic buyer, and who else is in the deal?

    Selling to a CFO and selling to a developer are different jobs.

  4. 4.

    What's the annual quota, and how was it set?

    A quota built from real data is a target. Otherwise it's a hope.

  5. 5.

    Where does pipeline come from: inbound, SDRs, or me?

    Tells you how much of your week is prospecting versus selling.

  6. 6.

    Why is this role open? Did someone leave, or is it new?

    New headcount is growth. A replacement means someone left. Ask why.

When the offer comes

Save these for later. They land better once they've said yes to you.

  1. 1.

    Can I see the full comp plan in writing, including clawbacks and accelerators?

    What's in writing is what gets paid. Read it before you sign.

  2. 2.

    Can I see the actual comp distribution for the team last year, not just the OTE?

    The spread shows what most reps really take home. OTE is just the target.

  3. 3.

    I'd be walking away from earned commission to join. Is there room for a sign-on bonus to help cover that?

    Leaving money behind is a fair reason to ask. The worst answer is no.

Josh's top five questions for any sales interview →

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The role

Technical pre-sales role partnering with Account Executives on discovery, architecture, demos and PoCs for enterprise accounts, then owning adoption, renewal and expansion on a variable quota.

Enterprise · Mixed

Selling motion

Mixed

Who you're selling to

Buyer:
Not stated in the posting.Ask: “Who's the economic buyer, and who else is in the deal?”
Company size:
Enterprise

Pipeline expectations

Not stated in the posting.

Compensation

The posting doesn't list pay.

What is not disclosed

This posting doesn't tell you:

  • Base salary
  • OTE
  • Quota size
  • Quota attainment
  • Average deal size
  • Sales cycle length

The questions above cover the big ones.

Full posting
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. At Cloudflare, we’re not looking for people who wait for a polished roadmap; we’re looking for the builders who see the cracks in the Internet that everyone else has simply learned to live with. We value candidates who have the instinct to spot a "normalized" problem and the AI-native curiosity to create a solution using the latest tools. Our culture is built on iteration, leveraging AI to ship faster today to make it better tomorrow, while ensuring that every improvement, no matter how small, is shared across the team to lift everyone up. If you’re the type of person who values curiosity over bureaucracy, and that AI is a partner in solving tough problems to keep the Internet moving forward, you’ll fit right in. Available Location: Beijing, China About the Role At Cloudflare, we are on a mission to help build a better Internet. As the architectural complexity of enterprise solutions scales, we are evolving how we partner with our customers. The Customer Engineer (CE) represents the core driver of our technical go-to-market strategy: a trusted advisor who owns the technical relationship from the initial discovery phase through to long-term adoption and ongoing account expansion. Sitting within the GTM organization and reporting to the Regional 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, utilizing 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. Key Responsibilities - Technical Validation: Partner closely with Account Executives to lead technical discovery, build bespoke architectures, and deliver compelling product demonstrations and Proof of Concepts (PoCs) across Cloudflare’s portfolio (Security, Networking, Zero Trust and Developer Platforms). - 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. - Strategic Alignment: Own the long-term technical relationship across the entire customer lifecycle, ensuring continuous alignment between the customer’s evolving business goals and our product roadmap. - Commercial Accountability & Expansion: Carry a variable quota tied directly to new business acquisition and/or ongoing account growth. You will 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. - AI Orchestration & Workflow Automation: Act as an "AI-Augmented" engineer. Leverage AI agents and internal platforms to automate routine tasks such as RFP/Security Questionnaire responses, sandbox provisioning, and basic telemetry monitoring, reclaiming your time for strategic customer advisory. Minimum Qualifications - Experience: Experience in a customer-facing technical role, such as Solutions Engineering, Customer Engineering, Sales Engineering, or as a Forward Deployed Engineer. - Technical Acumen: Broad technical expertise spanning web security, networking (routing, DNS, DDoS mitigation), cloud infrastructure, and enterprise architecture. - Commercial Mindset: Proven track record of operating in a quota-carrying or revenue-aligned environment, with a strong understanding of SaaS metrics, business value translation, and enterprise sales cycles. - Communication: Exceptional presentation and stakeholder management skills, capable of bridging the gap between deep technical implementation details and high-level C-suite business strategy. Strongly Preferred Qualifications (The "Good-to-Haves") - Cloudflare Developer Stack Experience: Hands-on experience building, deploying, or architecting solutions using Cloudflare's developer platform and AI ecosystem, specifically Workers AI and AI Gateway. - Applied AI Knowledge: Experience with prompt engineering, Large Language Model (LLM) orchestration, or Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures. - Coding/Scripting: Proficiency in Python, JavaScript, or similar languages to write custom integration scripts, API connectors, and edge computing functions. Compensation This role features a competitive base salary and a variable commission structure tied directly to the successful execution of full-lifecycle commercial targets, including new business acquisition, ongoing adoption milestones, and overall account expansion. 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 government election websites in 33 states. 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! Please note that applicants who progress to the offer stage of the interview process may be asked to attend an in-person interview within one of the Cloudflare Offices or Cloudflare Hubs. More details about this will be available at that stage of the interview process. 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.
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