New

Senior Software Engineer, Distributed Systems

Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, California, San Francisco
101 Townsend Street (Show on map)
Apr 04, 2025
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! Hiring will be focused on those residing within the greater Austin, TX metro area. It will be a hybrid role, with the expectation of 2 days per week in the office. Software Engineer, All Levels Hiring Process & Cloudflare's Engineering Teams If you want to build things at Cloudflare but are unsure about which team to apply for, this role will give you the best opportunity to match with a team that is most aligned to your experience, skill, and ambition. We've created a hiring process designed to find great candidates and figure out where they fit best as we go along. At the end of the hiring process you will have the opportunity to meet with one or more teams to find out if there is a fit, but if you discover during the interview process that a particular team or product area is 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 people 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 high-growth products, help scale our expanding network, build tools to improve availability, performance, uptime, and response times, and make systems failure-resistant and ready-to-scale. Cloudflare is a system spanning the globe, on 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, runs at a massive scale, and is deployed to 330+ cities around the world. Examples of software systems at Cloudflare: Since we don't know what team you'll be working on quite yet, here's some things that we do at Cloudflare. This is not a complete list, but gives a good indica tion of the wide variety of things you might work on. 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. Data Science diving deep into HTTP request data, identifying malicious and fraudulent traffic patterns, and building novel solutions for mitigating such attacks. Full Machine Learning platform and model development, from feature engineering to model development to release and monitoring. One of the biggest data pipelines in the world, operating at well over 250M events per second We operate some of the fastest, and most widely distributed 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 a massive scale, so what you do will have a huge impact. Requirements for any role If you think some of this list describes you (or what you aspire to be) we would love to talk to you. While not listed as a requirement, we also want to call out that most roles need the flexibility to be on-call outside of standard working hours to address technical issues as needed. First and foremost curiosity and critical thinking Experience (and love for) debugging to ensure the system works in all cases Experience with a continuous integration workflow and using source control (we use git) Designing and building APIs Understanding of what it takes to build secure systems Confidence to work in multiple programming languages - bonus points for Go and/or Rust Examples of desirable skills, knowledge and experience Some team-specific things we think are interesting and want to highlight. 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 Optimization of complex solutions Experience with databases (we use PostgreSQL and Clickhouse) Understanding what it takes to build and maintain distributed systems Good Unix knowledge, having submitted patches to Operating Systems a huge plus for some roles Experience with monitoring, alerting and debugging high volume production systems Fluent in analyses of data sets such as logs Understanding of security and fraud detection systems 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.