Engineering Manager, Data Center Operations

Job description

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. About the Department Infrastructure Operations builds and manages the data center infrastructure behind Cloudflare's global network. The organization brings together engineering, operations, hardware and logistics teams that plan, deploy, operate and maintain our footprint in hundreds of cities worldwide. In this role, you'll help extend that footprint with a new generation of data center sites across the United States. About the Role We're looking for an experienced Data Center Operations manager to build and run the team that brings these new sites online and keeps them running around the clock. You will build a distributed team of Data Center Engineers from the ground up. You'll own sites across their full lifecycle: delivering greenfield builds through third-party vendors and colocation partners, running them in production, and retiring hardware securely at end of life. You'll be accountable for production hardware availability, 24x7 on-site response, and the operating model that lets this footprint scale. The role means balancing competing demands every day: build deadlines against build quality, dependence on partners against high standards, and fast incident response against careful compliance. You need to keep both sides of each in view. This role covers the physical layer: hardware, cabling, and Layer 1/Layer 2 connectivity. It works closely with network engineering and server provisioning teams but does not own them. What You'll Do Team Leadership • Hire, develop and manage Data Center Engineers based on-site at data centers across the US. Set clear expectations, career paths and a culture of ownership across a team spread over many sites. • Build and take part in a 24x7 on-call rotation with your team. Define coverage models, handover protocols and incident SLAs that hold up as the footprint grows. • Serve as the escalation point for on-site incidents. Coordinate engineers, colocation providers and vendors to restore service quickly, and lead root-cause analysis after major incidents so the same problem doesn't happen again. Site Delivery • Own build timelines from site readiness through hardware delivery, rack-and-stack, cabling, validation and handoff to production. • Run greenfield builds as multi-workstream programs. Coordinate third-party integrators, contractors and colocation providers to hit dates without cutting corners. • Be on-site during key build phases to oversee vendor work, verify quality and make sure sites are production-ready. Production Operations • Be accountable for availability targets for production hardware at your sites. Run break/fix, repairs, RMAs and spares strategy so that availability is measured, reported and improving. • Manage colocation providers and vendors day to day: escalatio