Software Engineer, Emerging Tech & Incubation

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.

We realize people do not fit into neat boxes. We are looking for curious and empathetic individuals who are committed to developing themselves and learning new skills, and we are ready to help you do that. We cannot complete our mission without building a diverse and inclusive team. We hire the best people based on an evaluation of their potential and support them throughout their time at Cloudflare. Come join us!

About the Department

Cloudflare’s Engineering Team builds and runs the software that handles trillions of requests per month. We also build and run the internal tools that build and run our software. The Engineering Team is split into two groups: one handles product development and the other handles operations. Product development covers both new features and functionality and scaling our existing software to meet the challenges of a massively growing customer base. The operations team handles one of the world’s largest networks with data centers in 102 cities worldwide.

About the Role

Cloudflare is a system spanning the globe, on a mission to make the internet better, safer, and more powerful everyday. As one of the engineers working on the Cloudflare Edge, you’ll work on the code that runs closest to the end user and is deployed into 150+ cities around the world.

Examples of software systems at our Edge include:

• A TLS/HTTP proxy to make the connection from eyeball to edge as fast and secure as possible

• Filtering malicious traffic and handling good traffic according to customer configuration

• Content optimization that takes content served from customer sites and makes it more performant

• A platform that runs “serverless” Workers and provides a key value store

• A reverse-proxy system that caches customer website content according to customer configuration

• Optimization of connections from Cloudflare to our customers' origin servers to reduce their load and increase performance

• Our Authoritative DNS server and our public resolver 1.1.1.1.

We operate some of the fastest services on the Internet. Your work will focus on building robust, secure, and high performance distributed systems. We are a small engineering team operating at massive scale, so what you do will have huge influence.

Examples of desirable skills, knowledge and experience

• Understand how the internet works at a protocol level, including the differences between what the specs say, and what actually happens on the internet

• Confidence to work in multiple programming languages - could include C, Go, Rust, Python, Lua and even PHP

• Experience (and love) for debugging to ensure the system works in all cases

• Strong systems level programming skills

• Excited by the idea of optimizing complex solutions to general problems that all websites face

• Experience with a continuous integration workflow and using source control (we use git)

• Good Unix knowledge, patches to Operating Systems a huge plus for some roles

• Understanding of security issues and responsibilities

• Experience with monitoring, alerting and debugging high volume production systems

• Fluent in analyses of data sets such as logs

• Designing and building APIs

• Great oral and written communications skills

• Desire to learn and improve

• Willing and eager to share knowledge, and mentor

What Makes Cloudflare Special?

We’re not just a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company. We’re a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company with a soul. Fundamental to our mission to help build a better Internet is protecting the free and open Internet.

Project Galileo: Since 2014, we've equipped more than 2,400 journalism and civil society organizations in 111 countries with powerful tools to defend themselves against attacks that would otherwise censor their work, technology already used by Cloudflare’s enterprise customers--at no cost.

Athenian Project: In 2017, we created the Athenian Project to ensure that state and local governments have the highest level of protection and reliability for free, so that their constituents have access to election information and voter registration. Since the project, we've provided services to more than 425 local government election websites in 33 states.

1.1.1.1: We released 1.1.1.1 to help fix the foundation of the Internet by building a faster, more secure and privacy-centric public DNS resolver. This is available publicly for everyone to use - it is the first consumer-focused service Cloudflare has ever released. Here’s the deal - we don’t store client IP addresses never, ever. We will continue to abide by our privacy commitment and ensure that no user data is sold to advertisers or used to target consumers.

Sound like something you’d like to be a part of? We’d love to hear from you!

This position may require access to information protected under U.S. export control laws, including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations. Please note that any offer of employment may be conditioned on your authorization to receive software or technology controlled under these U.S. export laws without sponsorship for an export license.

Cloudflare is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunity for all people and place great value in both diversity and inclusiveness. All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to their, or any other person's, perceived or actual race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, family care status, or any other basis protected by law. We are an AA/Veterans/Disabled Employer.

Cloudflare provides reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities. Please tell us if you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job. Examples of reasonable accommodations include, but are not limited to, changing the application process, providing documents in an alternate format, using a sign language interpreter, or using specialized equipment. If you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job, please contact us via e-mail at [email protected] or via mail at 101 Townsend St. San Francisco, CA 94107.