Principal Systems Engineer

Available Locations: Austin, Atlanta, Denver, Seattle, Washington D.C
About the role
We're seeking an exceptional Principal Engineer to join our newly formed Product Platform Task Force-a high-impact team that tackles critical infrastructure initiatives spanning our entire product suite and Cloudflare's massive edge network.
What you'll do
You'll partner with engineering leadership to identify, architect, and drive execution on complex technical projects that transcend individual team boundaries, from organization-wide authentication and authorization systems to ultra-distributed architectures that leverage Cloudflare's global edge infrastructure, performance optimizations, and shared services that enable multiple products. This role is perfect for a seasoned technical leader who excels at solving ambiguous, high-stakes problems with broad organizational impact, mentoring senior engineers, and establishing technical direction that influences the entire engineering organization. You'll have significant autonomy to shape our technical strategy while working collaboratively across product teams, platform engineers, and executive leadership to ensure our infrastructure scales efficiently and our engineering culture thrives.
Responsibilities

• Define technical strategy and lead execution of high-impact, cross-cutting initiatives that benefit the entire engineering organization, such as service-to-service authentication systems, RBAC/authorization frameworks, ultra-distributed architectures leveraging Cloudflare's edge network, API layer improvements, observability infrastructure, and shared services that span our product portfolio.
• Architect and implement security-critical systems including authentication, authorization, and access control mechanisms that work seamlessly across our distributed infrastructure, ensuring both robust security postures and excellent developer experiences for teams building on these platforms.
• Design and build ultra-distributed systems that take full advantage of Cloudflare's massive global edge network, including edge computing with Workers and Durable Objects, ensuring our services deliver exceptional performance and reliability to users worldwide while managing the complexity of geo-distributed state and coordination.
• Set architectural standards and technical direction for our Product Platform stack-including Go services, Python pipelines, TypeScript edge computing (Cloudflare Workers/Durable Objects), and PostgreSQL data layer-ensuring decisions balance immediate business needs with long-term scalability, maintainability, and engineering velocity.
• Identify critical technical debt, systemic inefficiencies, and infrastructure gaps across the organization, building business cases and driving consensus among leadership to fund and execute solutions that might otherwise fall through the cracks of product-focused roadmaps.
• Serve as a technical force multiplier by embedding with tiger teams or product groups that need deep infrastructure expertise, providing architectural leadership, hands-on implementation where needed, and ensuring projects ship with production-grade reliability, security, and performance.
• Mentor and elevate senior engineers across the organization through code reviews, architectural discussions, and technical design reviews, establishing patterns and practices for distributed systems, security, and edge computing that raise the bar for engineering excellence throughout the company.

Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience:

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with a demonstrated history of leading complex, organization-wide technical initiatives that delivered measurable improvements to system performance, reliability, security, developer productivity, or engineering culture.
• Deep expertise in building distributed systems and production infrastructure at scale, with proficiency in Go and strong working knowledge of Python/TypeScript; proven ability to make sound architectural decisions for systems that span multiple data centers, regions, or edge locations.
• Strong understanding of authentication, authorization, and security fundamentals including experience designing and implementing service-to-service authentication systems, RBAC/permission models, identity management, or similar security-critical infrastructure.
• Extensive experience with PostgreSQL or similar relational databases at scale, including advanced optimization techniques, replication strategies, and understanding the tradeoffs of distributed data storage and consistency models.
• Strong track record of technical leadership and influence without direct authority, including driving consensus on technical decisions across multiple teams, mentoring senior engineers, and establishing architectural patterns that are widely adopted across an organization.
• Exceptional ability to navigate ambiguous problem spaces, identify the highest-impact technical work, and drive projects autonomously from conception through adoption-balancing pragmatic execution with long-term technical excellence.
• Please be prepared to discuss specific examples of organization-wide technical initiatives you've led, particularly distributed systems or security infrastructure, their measurable business impact, and how you influenced technical direction across multiple teams.

Nice to Have Skills

• Deep experience with Cloudflare's developer platform, particularly Cloudflare Workers, Durable Objects, and architecting ultra-distributed applications for edge computing environments at global scale.
• Previous experience as a Principal Engineer, Staff+ engineer, or technical leader on platform, infrastructure, or task force teams that operate outside traditional product roadmaps with a focus on enabling engineering organizations.
• Proven expertise in building developer platforms, service mesh architectures, zero-trust security systems, API gateways, or other foundational distributed infrastructure that significantly improved engineering velocity or operational excellence.
• Experience architecting and operating billing systems, usage metering, or other high-stakes platform components that require exceptional reliability, accuracy, and work correctly in distributed, eventually-consistent environments.
• Public evidence of technical leadership such as conference talks on distributed systems or security, widely-read technical blog posts, significant open source contributions, or published architectural patterns that have been adopted by the broader engineering community.

Compensation
Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.

• For New York City, Washington, Washington D.C. and California (excluding Bay Area) based hires: Estimated annual salary of $230,000 - $281,000

Equity
This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare's equity plan.
Benefits
Cloudflare offers a complete package of benefits and programs to support you and your family. Our benefits programs can help you pay health care expenses, support caregiving, build capital for the future and make life a little easier and fun! The below is a description of our benefits for employees in the United States, and benefits may vary for employees based outside the U.S.
Health & Welfare Benefits

• Medical/Rx Insurance
• Dental Insurance
• Vision Insurance
• Flexible Spending Accounts
• Commuter Spending Accounts
• Fertility & Family Forming Benefits
• On-demand mental health support and Employee Assistance Program
• Global Travel Medical Insurance

Financial Benefits

• Short and Long Term Disability Insurance
• Life & Accident Insurance
• 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan
• Employee Stock Participation Plan

Time Off

• Flexible paid time off covering vacation and sick leave
• Leave programs, including parental, pregnancy health, medical, and bereavement leave