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!

Software Engineer, All Levels
(Hybrid)

Hiring Process & Cloudflare's Application Performance Engineering Teams

If you are obsessed with making the Internet faster, safer and more reliable for everyone, but are unsure about which team to apply for, this role will give you the best opportunity to match with a Software Engineering team that is most aligned to your experience, skill, and ambition. We've created a hiring process designed to find top tier candidates passionate about improving web and software application performance and help them find the best team fit for them at Cloudflare. At the end of the hiring process you will have the opportunity to meet with one or more teams to find out if they are the best team match, but if you discover during the interview process that a particular team is the most interesting to you let us know.

About Engineering at Cloudflare

Cloudflare’s Engineers build and operate the software that helps power 25+ million Internet properties and millions of businesses around the world. Across our engineering organizations, we have opportunities for high caliber, curious and empathetic technology enthusiasts to take on big challenges and build some of the best skills in the industry. We’re looking for talented team members to help build and quickly iterate on high-growth products, scale our expanding network, build tools to improve availability, performance, uptime, and response times, and make systems fault-tolerant and elastic.

Cloudflare’s network is a massively distributed system spanning more than 300 cities in over 125 countries, including 35 cities in Mainland China and interconnects with approximately 13,000 networks globally with a mission to make the Internet better, safer, and more powerful every day. As a Software Engineer at Cloudflare, you’ll work on the code that runs close to the end user at Internet scale.

Examples of software systems at Cloudflare:

A TLS/HTTP proxy to make the connection from eyeball to edge as fast and secure as possible
Content optimization that takes content served from customer sites and makes it more performant
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
Data Science diving deep into HTTP request data, identifying malicious and fraudulent traffic patterns, and building novel solutions for mitigating such attacks.
One of the biggest data pipelines in the world, operating at well over 250M events per second
Open source projects including Pingora, Trie-hard and more to come..

Requirements for this role

First and foremost curiosity and critical thinking
Experience (and love for) debugging complex distributed systems
Experience with a continuous integration workflow and using source control (we use git)
Experience with build and maintain distributed systems
Understanding of what it takes to build secure systems
Ability to work in multiple systems level programming languages - bonus points for Go and/or Rust
Experience with monitoring, alerting and debugging high volume production systems

Examples of desirable skills, knowledge and experience

Minimum 4 years professional experience as a developer/engineer
Solid grasp of how TCP/QUIC and HTTP work
Experience with Linux networking
Understanding systems at the network protocol level, including the differences between what the specs say, and what actually happens on the Internet
Strong systems level programming skills
Experience with databases similar to PostgreSQL and Clickhouse
Good Unix knowledge, having submitted patches to Operating Systems a huge plus for some roles
Fluent in analyses of large data sets
BA/BS or higher in Computer Science/Engineering or equivalent professional experience

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 hr@cloudflare.com or via mail at 101 Townsend St. San Francisco, CA 94107.

Software Engineer, Application Performance