Senior Manager, Solutions Engineering UKI

Work Location: London
Cloudflare's Solutions Engineering (SE) function is responsible for collaborating with clients from early-stage ideation through to planning for production. Being much more than an expert solely in Cloudflare's services, our Solutions Engineers are expected to sit alongside our peers in our clients, and to contribute their energy, ideas and opinion on solving the hard problems we face in our industry today. Often this means deep work on the art-of-the possible (and sometimes being willing to put aside preconceptions on the impossible!).
What you'll do
As a Solutions Engineering Manager, you set the cadence of the team's communication, collaboration and culture. Supporting the personalised individual development plan for each team member, you will coach our UK & Ireland SE colleagues to excel across the sales and technical disciplines necessary to support a successful team. You will also work closely with our public sector clients by shadowing and improving your team's technical expertise to help develop good practice and ensure a high standard of customer success.
Responsible for the hiring, on-boarding, enablement and technical pre-sales performance of the Public Sector Solutions Engineering team, you will be the focal point for coordinating the team's resources to have the greatest customer impact and to help provide guidance when specific assistance is required or to escalate early and to engage the correct resources at the right time.
For this role, our Solutions Engineering team members focus on large clients for whom we are able to develop deep understanding and partnership to collaborate with. Building on a track-record of success such as that demonstrated with recent projects with the NCSC (https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/news/ncsc-new-pdns-partnership), this role has an emphasis on supporting our clients in both local and central government, blue light services and defence. Previous experience in supporting the public sector is beneficial, however not mandatory.
To aid your team, you will work closely with cross-functional teams at Cloudflare, from Sales and Product, through to Engineering and Customer Support. Your goal of customer success should drive you through the entire organisation as you seek out and advise your team on how to create scalable solutions for your customer's needs.
Who we are
The problems that our clients face are both diverse and unique - which is reflected in how we think about our Solution Engineering team. Building on the benefit of the hive-mind, our SE team is made up of individuals from a wide range of backgrounds - from end-customers to other vendors, Financial Consulting to Product Management, Customer Support to Software Engineering. In short, if we are to solve complex problems we need a diverse, curious and collaborative team.
Cloudflare's mission is one which is both simple and timeless, to help build a better Internet. This requires a broad set of services and associated knowledge of Internet performance and security technology. We recognise many of our team usually join us with one or two core domains of expertise, however key to success is the curiosity to maintain and develop new knowledge which is essential to keeping up with the high rate of product innovation at Cloudflare.
In our aim to support your success, all the resources and training required to build a custom personal development plan to be effective for the role, will be provided.
As mentioned, the emphasis on working with public sector clients would benefit from having previously held Security Clearance (SC) status, however this is not mandatory, however candidates will be asked to go through SC vetting as part of the role.
Examples of desirable skills, knowledge and experience
Our Solutions Engineers come from a wide range of backgrounds: financial consulting, engineering, software development, product management, customer support & project delivery. We're serious about building a diverse team. When hiring we look for diversity of experience combined with genuine curiosity for our technology.
Ultimately, you are passionate about technology, have the ability to explain complex technical concepts in easy-to-understand terms, and you like coaching and teaching.
Requirements

• Demonstrable experience in coaching, leadership skills or team management.
• Demonstrable experience in understanding and solving escalations, team issues or other management related scenarios.
• Proven track record of successfully partnering with account executives and customer success teams to deliver Cloudflare solutions to customers.

Inter-Team Goals

• Cultivate cross SE team/office coordination, keep us all connected as one team.
• Facilitate knowledge transfer between SE teams:
• Ensure the team learns from the great ideas of single team members.
• Ensure mistakes are not repeated within the team.
• Develop strong relationships outside of SE organisation to aid in escalation of issues (product/support/engineering/special projects/marketing/legal/etc).
• Maintain strong communication with Account Executives and Customer Success leads.

Intra-Team Goals

• Keep the pulse of the team: who is happy, productive, performing. Know each member's strengths and how they would each like to develop.
• Exemplify and cultivate positive culture traits.
• Provide support and confidence to team members.
• Cultivate a very open communication environment. Criticism is welcome and appreciated.
• Maintain a culture of independence amongst team members while offering advice to team members on how to improve.

Personal Goals

• Operate as a highly performing individual contributor.
• Maintain trust and respect from the team.
• Ability to handle any call, from any customer.

Responsibilities

• Workload Management.
• Report on individual SE strengths and weaknesses and support performance management to achieve high-standards of success
• Conduct 1:1's with team members.
• Act as a point of escalation for team issues, escalate issues that can't be solved in the team.
• Recruit, interview, and on-board new team members.