Additional information

Access, reading, presentations & sources

Reference material for the Cloudflare Customer Engineer (CE) Technical Onboarding Program: section 10 onward and the source inventory.

10. Access & tooling

Source of truth is the SE Onboarding Account Access wiki — request via Opal. The value this table adds is the second column: when you actually need it, tribal knowledge carried over from Mike Stone's Week 0 notes. Do not request everything on day one.

System	When you actually need it
Internal Cloudflare Dashboard	Day 1. Create at dash.cloudflare.com with your @cloudflare.com email, not a personal one.
TME Demo Account	Day 1 — the demo environment for most product areas. Email tme@cloudflare.com if it is not visible.
NinjaPanel	Week 1–2. Go through it with your buddy in detail; do not self-teach.
Salesforce	Day 1 for read access. You write to it as soon as you own accounts; the hygiene expectations are taught in second-phase module 2. No authenticator app needed — use alternate MFA.
GitLab	Day 1 for the setup script. Contact the DevTools chatroom if blocked.
JIRA	Day 1. Confirm groups: confluence-users, jira-developers, jira-users, stash-users, solutions-engineering.
Google Cloud (SE Team project)	Week 1, for test origins. Join the se@cloudflare.com group first. Tag every instance owner:{ldap} or it gets reaped. Alternatives now exist — internal demo accounts, or Workers with domains pointing at null IPs.
Support Dashboard	Week 6 — required. Step 3 of the ladder runs through it, and you work cases rather than just reading them.
Customer360 / Lighthouse	Week 6 for troubleshooting context; central to the adoption and renewal module.
Catchpoint	Defer. Only for real performance tests, typically head-to-head against the likes of Fastly. AskIT ticket, CC your manager. Each test is expensive — use sparingly.
BigQuery	Defer. Comes in with the adoption and renewal module; useful for renewal conversations. Generic access via the BQ Okta group against the cloudflare-bi table; no PII access needed.
Wiki	Day 1. Watch the SOLUTIONS space; bookmark the SE Bookmark Library.
Zoom, gChat, email signature	Day 1, via People/IT resources. Join the Global Customer Engineering gChat room — that is where the call calendar lives.
Magic Transit Lab account	Defer. Tier 3 — the pod leads these. Request only if supporting a live opportunity.
China Testing account	Defer. Need-to-have only. Lean on the China CDN team — the regulatory environment changes constantly.
ClickHouse / Tabix	Skip. Restricted for compliance reasons and not used in practice.

11. The presentation template

Four presentations, rolling, in Weeks 2, 4, 5 and 6 — one per week, not as a block (D6).

Introductions
Technical discovery — customer pain points, architecture, current setup
Cloudflare products — how they solve those specific pain points
Onboarding — the steps to get Cloudflare in place
Life after go-live — how it gets tuned, how it breaks, how you troubleshoot it, and when it escalates
Q&A

Step 5 is new and non-negotiable: a presentation that stops at the sale no longer demonstrates the role. Hold every module to the nine-point lifecycle lens in §3.

12. Ongoing: the CE mindset

"Never stop shadowing calls. There is no end to the things a curious mind will find."

The 85/15 rule. 85% of customer situations are covered by shadowing, self-reading and basic customer work. The hard part of ramping is the other 15% — product weaknesses, exceptions and tribal-knowledge workarounds. Training sessions exist to surface those. With a 7-week core, more of the 15% gets learned live — which is exactly why the second phase runs alongside real work rather than before it.
Build, don't just read. Use the GCP SE Team project, the Labs Catalog and Demo Tools to provision, break and fix.
Shadow across the whole lifecycle. When you get into a discovery or PoC kickoff, follow the thread through the subsequent calls — and keep following it through onboarding, tuning and escalation. The full arc is the job.
Own step 1; respect step 3. Initial troubleshooting is your obligation. Escalating afterwards is correct practice, not defeat. Support is a professional function with visibility and authority you do not have — neither bypass it nor lean on it prematurely.
Then give back. The senior/mentor track is the other half of the Hive: lead a session, own a product module, host an office hour, or become a CE Buddy.

13. Buddy eligibility and converting tenured engineers

Buddy eligibility is the competency bar

An engineer is eligible to be a CE Buddy when they are competent across all areas of the role — that is, they meet the Gate A standard, including the post-sales and escalation competencies. Buddies are therefore assumed competent to teach and sign off every part of this program, including the lifecycle week and the second-phase modules.

This resolves what would otherwise have been a bootstrapping problem: the mentor population is defined by competency, not by tenure, so a converting engineer who has not yet met the bar coaches nobody until they do. Maintaining that roster matters — see D22.

The conversion bridge

For tenured engineers who do not yet meet the Gate A bar. Start with self-assessment against Gates 1 and A, then assign only the missing modules rather than running everyone through all of it.

Module	From	Why a tenured engineer still needs it
Lifecycle lens retrofit	§3, items 7–9	They know the products cold, but were trained to sell them. Tuning, troubleshooting and adoption were someone else's job.
The escalation ladder	§5	The pod, the Specialist role, and the three-step obligation are all new. The old "loop in an SA or Specialist SE" reflex needs remapping.
Lifecycle core	Week 6	Onboarding delivery and the handshake as a discipline are new.
Troubleshooting & tools	Second phase, module 1	Most have never used TraceGen, Rulesets Admin, Flute or Bushbaby systematically — the tools were never taught to anyone.
PoC, BVA, competitive & SFDC	Second phase, module 2	Explicitly out of scope in the prior curriculum.
Adoption, renewal & escalation depth	Second phase, module 5	Entirely new. The largest single delta.

Source inventory

Source	Contributed	Proposed disposition
SE Technical Onboarding — Hive (SONIC)	Cohort delivery, ~24-session recording and summary-notes library, mentor track, office hours, feedback form, enablement wishlist	Keep and keep running. The delivery engine, not a competing curriculum; cross-linked from the Enterprise CE West program page rather than absorbed into it. Its session order already matches the core closely. No session exists for the lifecycle week or the adoption module — acknowledged, not blocking (G18). Its wishlist becomes the intake for Tier 4 optional training.
Mike Stone — New Hire Training (AppSec) + 11 child pages	Week-by-week curriculum, scope guardrails, SME model, demo environments and limitations, reading philosophy, Magic Transit guardrails, program-length finding	Remains the spine of the core. Weeks 1–5 are his sequence, uncompressed. His out-of-scope instinct is what makes a 7-week core arithmetically possible. Retain child pages as per-week reading lists until migrated, then redirect.
~saldrich — CE Onboarding Checklist	Access and tooling, AI agent setup, tool inventory, competency criteria, 85/15 rule, post-sales lifecycle, current product naming	Folded in, and its central premise confirmed — it anticipated the combined-role CE ahead of the retitling. Redirect to the Enterprise CE West program page (D1).

Upstream sources these three already point at, which should stay canonical rather than be copied here: SE Onboarding Account Access · New Hire Orientation (PPL) · First Week Laptop Setup (DEVTOOLS) · Agents for All (PS) · SE/CSE Bootcamp · Enterprise Onboarding Checklist · Customer Onboarding Guides · Solutions Engineer Resources · Jay Dombroski's SE Checklist · Engineering Bootcamp · SE Bookmark Library · Cloudflare Developer Docs.

Consolidated from three wiki sources. Product scope, week sequencing, demo environments, tool lists and links are reproduced from those pages. The two-phase structure, the tiering, the lifecycle lens, the escalation ladder, the buddy-eligibility bar and the conversion bridge are proposals for review. Scope was deliberately narrowed to a 7-week core.