Escalation Engineer - Network/Security

Available Location: Austin, TX
About the Department
The Customer Support Team solves complicated problems and answers technical inquiries via phone, email, chat, and social media. Whether it is a WordPress blogger using our services for free or a global Enterprise business with petabytes of web traffic, our team is always eager to assist. 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.
Role Summary
The Cloudflare Escalation Engineer will perform deep, technical troubleshooting for complex, escalated issues. This role owns the customer escalation process and works with various Product and Engineering teams to identify product bugs, network problems, and platform issues. Escalation Engineers foster a close relationship with SRE, Network, Engineering and Product teams. They act as an escalation point, isolate/replicate problems, and gather technical information/expectation.
Responsibilities

• Serve as a subject-matter expert in supporting network, routing and transport layer protocols such as BGP, OSPF, IPSec, GRE, TCP, UDP, etc.
• Serve as a subject-matter expert in supporting Security products and technologies such as WAF, Firewall, IPS, DDoS, etc.
• Collaborate closely with engineering and product teams to escalate issues, provide root cause analysis, and contribute to product improvements.
• Create and maintain detailed knowledge base articles, troubleshooting guides, and technical documentation.
• Provide coverage (shift rotation, including possibility of weekends and Pacific Time hours) for technical troubleshooting of escalated issues.
• Triage Customer Escalation issues to find the quickest, most efficient path of resolution.
• Work cross-functionally with various teams across the company, from engineering to sales.

Requirements

• Minimum of 3 years' hands-on experience supporting enterprise network and/or security environments.
• Strong foundation in networking and security principles, technologies, and troubleshooting, including:
• TCP/IP fundamentals, including OSI model, IPv4/IPv6 addressing, subnetting, routing, and switching
• Common network protocols such as DNS, DHCP, HTTP/S, SNMP, SMTP, NTP, and FTP/SFTP
• Routing protocols including BGP, OSPF, and EIGRP, with an understanding of path selection
• Firewall concepts such as stateful/stateless inspection, rule sets, NAT, and ACLs
• VPN technologies and encryption methods (IPSec, SSL/TLS)
• Network segmentation and Zero Trust security models
• Intrusion detection and prevention (IDS/IPS)
• Endpoint and network threat mitigation strategies
• Security incident response processes and basic forensic principles
• Proficiency in network troubleshooting using packet capture and analysis tools (e.g., Wireshark, tcpdump).
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to convey technical information clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Demonstrated ability to manage multiple priorities and projects effectively in a fast-paced environment.

Core competencies ("Desired skills, knowledge and experience")

• Extensive technical support experience.
• Expertise in troubleshooting application protocols (L7 - DNS, HTTP, etc).
• Expertise in troubleshooting network infrastructure (L3/L4).
• Expert with Linux command line tools (curl, dig, git, traceroute, mtr).
• Expert at analyzing data using tools like Grafana, Kibana, and SQL.
• Able to clarify complex technical issues and coordinate efforts to resolve.
• Able to identify and share/suggest process improvements.
• Demonstrated leadership, prior mentoring experience.
• Self-motivated, self-directed, strong relationship building, can positively influence the actions of others, team player.
• Comfortable handling inbound and outbound customer calls.

Bonus Points

• You are familiar with Cloudflare and are actively using our platform.
• Experience with regular expressions.
• Knowledge of web programming (HTML, Javascript, PHP) and scripting (bash, Python).
• Experience managing/configuring non-HTTP applications (email, DNS, FTP, SSH, etc).
• Experience with cloud networking and security in AWS, Azure, or GCP.