What You'll Do
- Lead and Mentor: Manage a high-performing team of kernel and systems engineers, fostering a culture of "collaboration-first" and continuous knowledge sharing both internally and with the global open-source community.
- Own the OS Lifecycle: Oversee the end-to-end delivery of the Linux Kernel and core OS components. Your goal is a fully automated continuous delivery pipeline that moves from merge to 100% production in less than 30 days.
- Drive Technical Vision: Steer the Cloudflare kernel development roadmap. You will balance the need for cutting-edge features with the absolute requirements of production stability, security, and performance.
- Upstream Advocacy: Promote a "minimal patch" philosophy by ensuring your team is a top contributor to the Linux Kernel. You will support engineers in becoming upstream maintainers for critical subsystems.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Act as a consultant to hardware and service teams, helping them onboard new hardware and optimize workloads for our OS. You'll lead a "virtual team" environment where any engineer at Cloudflare can contribute to the kernel.
- Innovate Debugging: Tackle the "impossible" challenges of kernel-level debugging. You will lead the development of automated systems that collect critical telemetry when a system crashes, even when traditional debuggers cannot run.
- Measure Success: Use DORA metrics and team-specific capabilities - such as the "time to fix a kernel issue" and upstream commit volume - to track and improve team impact.
What You'll Bring
- Systems Leadership: 5+ years of experience managing engineering teams, ideally in low-level systems, kernel development, or large-scale infrastructure environments.
- Low-Level Expertise: A deep understanding of Linux Kernel internals, x86/ARM architecture, and OS design fundamentals. You should be comfortable discussing memory management, schedulers, and network stacks.
- Automation Mindset: Experience building or managing CI/CD pipelines for foundational software. You believe that "toil" is a bug and automation is the feature.
- Open Source Pedigree: A proven track record of engaging with the open-source community. You understand the nuances of upstreaming and how to navigate community dynamics effectively.
- Operational Empathy: An understanding of the unique challenges of a global "reboot-limited" production environment. You prioritize stability and have experience with pre-production QA and synthetic workload evaluation.
- Strategic Communication: The ability to translate complex kernel-level obstacles into actionable business insights for stakeholders across the company.
- Resilience: You aren't intimidated by the "impossible." Whether it's a non-reproducible race condition or an unwelcoming upstream thread, you lead your team through the challenge with a pragmatic, solution-oriented mindset.
Cloudflare Compensation & Benefits Highlights
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Healthcare Strength — Employer-verified medical, dental, and vision coverage, mental-health/EAP support, FSAs/HSAs, disability and life insurance, and pet insurance for U.S. employees are explicitly included. The overall package is presented as comprehensive across core health protections.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Unlimited/flexible PTO, paid holidays and sick time, plus three paid volunteer days per year are highlighted. These policies indicate generous time-off flexibility beyond standard accrual models.
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Equity Value & Accessibility — Employees commonly receive equity alongside an Employee Stock Purchase Plan with a discounted purchase feature. Relocation support and home-office stipends further reinforce access to ownership and distributed-work enablers.
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What We Do
Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE: NET) is the leading connectivity cloud company on a mission to help build a better Internet. It empowers organizations to make their employees, applications and networks faster and more secure everywhere, while reducing complexity and cost. Cloudflare’s connectivity cloud delivers the most full-featured, unified platform of cloud-native products and developer tools, so any organization can gain the control they need to work, develop, and accelerate their business. Powered by one of the world’s largest and most interconnected networks, Cloudflare blocks billions of threats online for its customers every day. It is trusted by millions of organizations – from the largest brands to entrepreneurs and small businesses to nonprofits, humanitarian groups, and governments across the globe.
Why Work With Us
Cloudflare employees come from all walks of life. We are mission-driven, and our team is energized by a collaborative, creative environment that celebrates our differences and fosters new ways to grow together.
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Employees engage in a combination of remote and on-site work.
We are committed to developing a global team that is distributed with a flexible working approach. Doing this equitably and inclusively is essential to our success. Visit our careers site for more on 'How & Where We Work.'
