Nico van Niekerk

Technical Enablement Architect & Solutions Engineer, ex-Cloudflare | Application Delivery · API Security · Edge & Reverse Proxy | Automation & CI/CD

Greater Sydney Area

About

Hands-on architect specializing in application delivery, with a varied two-decade career across startups, enterprises, integrators, and vendors. I translate customer requirements into working systems and mentor engineers across the teams I work with. Outside of work I volunteer as a Surf Lifesaver at my local beach.

Experience

  • Cloudflare (Full-time · 6 yrs 7 mos)
    • Technical Enablement Architect
      Jul 2025 - May 2026 · 11 mos

      Instructor-led training for new technical hires during Cloudflare onboarding, plus designing and authoring technical courses and hands-on labs. Delivered in-person advanced training to 160+ enterprise customers and attendees at Cloudflare Connect October 2025, anchored by a distributed programmable traffic generator I built under tight time constraints: a Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects control plane driving distributed Deno, Go, and Python probes, containerised with Docker and deployed across GCP-hosted VMs, other VM hosts, and Raspberry Pi devices generating L4 and L7 traffic.

    • Customer Solutions Engineer
      Jan 2021 - Jul 2025 · 4 yrs 7 mos

      Technical trusted advisor and post-sales solutions lead for Cloudflare's largest enterprise accounts in ANZ, guiding them through complex network security, API protection, and application performance architectures. Advised customers on Cloudflare API Shield patterns: schema validation, mTLS, JWT/OAuth verification, rate limiting, and abuse protection. Designed and delivered customer-facing workshops, product deep-dives, and tenant onboarding playbooks. Collaborated with CSMs, Product Management, and Engineering to shape product roadmaps and champion customer feature requests.

    • Solutions Engineer
      Nov 2019 - Dec 2020 · 1 yr 2 mos

      Led the technical pre-sales cycle: capturing enterprise requirements, running deep-dive technical discoveries, and designing custom solution blueprints. Guided large-scale enterprise customer onboarding across DNS, CDN, WAF, SSL, Cloudflare Workers, and Zero Trust. Wrote Python and Bash automation for administrative tasks, bulk tenant provisioning, and customer log analysis (including ad-hoc BigQuery SQL against Cloudflare's log datasets). Used Lua scripting on a limited basis to customize edge behaviour for early Cloudflare enterprise customers.

  • DevOps Engineer at GROW
    Jul 2019 - Nov 2019 · 5 mos

  • Senior Infrastructure Engineer at PropertySafe
    Apr 2019 - Jun 2019 · 3 mos

  • Cloud Engineer at Versent
    Jul 2018 - Apr 2019 · 10 mos

  • Security Engineer at Ansarada
    Feb 2017 - Jul 2018 · 1 yr 6 mos