Escalation Engineer, Zero Trust

Job 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 is a technical resource within support responsible for owning and resolving the most complex customer escalations. This role partners closely with Technical Support Engineers, proactively swarms on challenging cases, and provides hands-on guidance to accelerate issue resolution. Escalation Engineers lead deep technical investigations across the full stack, isolate and reproduce defects, and ensure accurate, timely communication throughout the escalation lifecycle. While they collaborate with Engineering and Product teams as needed, their primary focus is empowering the support organization, improving customer reliability, and driving high-quality outcomes for escalated customers. They contribute critical insights, document new knowledge, and help shape processes and readiness that strengthen the overall support experience.
Role Responsibilities

• Advanced Troubleshooting & Root Cause Analysis
  • Investigate the most complex, high-impact customer issues escalated from front-line support (TSEs) and directly raised by customers.
  • Perform deep-dive debugging across the full technology stack application, database, infrastructure, APIs, and integrations.
  • Serve as a subject matter expert in supporting Zero Trust technologies such as identity and access management (IAM), secure access service edge (SASE), endpoint security, and network segmentation tools.
  • Troubleshoot complex technical issues across a broad set of systems including authentication flows (SSO, MFA), policy enforcement, and secure application access.
  • Use logs, traces, diagnostics to identify the underlying cause.
  • Work with Engineering to validate defects, create reproducible scenarios, and confirm fixes.
  • Provide coverage (shift rotation including possibility of weekends and Pacific Time hours) for technical troubleshooting of escalated issues.

• Cross-Functional Escalation Management
  • Manage escalation lifecycle from intake to closure, ensuring technical accuracy and timely communication.
  • Partner with Product and Engineering teams to drive bug fixes or workarounds.
  • Communicate status, risk, and resolution progress clearly to support leaders and customers (as appropriate).

• Swarming & Collaboration with Support Teams
  • Proactively swarm on critical or complex cases with Technical Support Engineers within their regional or skill-based Pod.
  • Provide real-time guidance and mentoring during troubleshooting.
  • Be an expert engineer in the team, help front-line engineers improve their technical depth and escalation readiness.

• Knowledge Creation & Enablement
  • Document new findings, diagnostic steps, and resolutions in internal knowledge bases.
  • Share insights from escalations to improve product documentation and support training.
  • Contribute to runbooks and automation that help prevent future escalations.

• Readiness & Product Expertise
  • Stay current with new product releases, architecture changes, and known issues.
  • Participate in engineering syncs or release readiness reviews to represent the support perspective.
  • Serve as a subject matter expert (SME) in one or more technical domains.

Role Requirements (Must-Have Skills)

• Solid understanding of Zero Trust principles and technologies such as:
• Identity and Access Management
• Endpoint Detection & Response
• Network Security / Microsegmentation
• Secure Web Gateway / Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB)

• 3-5 years of technical troubleshooting experience, preferably in technical support or system reliability engineering
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, ability to disseminate clear and appropriate information to both business and technical audiences
• Able to manage multiple priorities, commitments, and projects
• You understand and have previous experience working with Identity and Access Management protocols and technologies (SSO, SAML, OAuth, Federation, SCIM, etc.)
• You understand and have previous experience supporting and troubleshooting multi-factor mechanisms (TOTP, SMS, FIDO, U2F, WebAuth, EMAIL, Push MFA, etc).

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 Zero Trust products (Zero Trust / Access / Gateway / Tunnel, WARP client) and have a site actively using our platform
• You have a solid grasp of problem-solving with command line tools (dig / traceroute / curl / tcpdump)
• Familiarity with troubleshooting Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems
• You are familiar with Apache, Nginx, IIS, and other web servers
• You have worked with PostgreSQL, MySQL, MS SQL or other database servers