Senior Systems Engineer

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.
At Cloudflare, we're not looking for people who wait for a polished roadmap; we're looking for the builders who see the cracks in the Internet that everyone else has simply learned to live with. We value candidates who have the instinct to spot a "normalized" problem and the AI-native curiosity to create a solution using the latest tools. Our culture is built on iteration, leveraging AI to ship faster today to make it better tomorrow, while ensuring that every improvement, no matter how small, is shared across the team to lift everyone up. If you're the type of person who values curiosity over bureaucracy, and that AI is a partner in solving tough problems to keep the Internet moving forward, you'll fit right in.
Senior Systems Engineer Available Locations

• Austin
• Atlanta
• Denver
• Seattle

About the Role
As a Senior Systems Engineer on the Cloudflare One Appliance team, you will shape and build the Linux-based edge appliance runtime and distributed control plane that connect customer sites to Cloudflare. The Appliance runs as physical hardware, a virtual appliance, and in public cloud environments. It gives customers a Cloudflare-managed way to operate hundreds or thousands of branch sites without building their own platform.
This is a hands-on role for a product-minded engineer who can move between low-level systems, distributed services, and API design, while providing technical leadership for major initiatives.
Our architecture follows a "light branch, heavy cloud" philosophy: put policy and intelligence in Cloudflare's network unless locality is required for correctness, survivability, performance, or user experience. The role requires strong technical judgment about that boundary. You will help us build systems that are secure, observable, resilient during partial failures, and safe to operate across a large fleet carrying customer-critical traffic.
Responsibilities

• Build systems end to end: Design and implement capabilities spanning the cloud control plane, Linux appliance runtime, telemetry pipeline, and physical, virtual, and cloud deployment environments.
• Build the Linux-based networking platform: Develop and harden the appliance dataplane. Build secure, reliable networking capabilities using technologies such as IPsec, MASQUE, eBPF, and Linux kernel networking primitives while keeping the system small, predictable, and secure.
• Engineer reliable fleet control: Build distributed control-plane and state-management systems that safely deliver configuration and commands, tolerate intermittent connectivity and partial failures, converge to known-good state, and support zero-touch operation across large device fleets.
• Secure the device lifecycle: Improve hardware-backed identity, attestation, secure boot, immutable operating-system images, credential rotation, and staged over-the-air upgrades with safe rollback and recovery.
• Make operability a product feature: Design telemetry, diagnostics, synthetic tests, support bundles, and remote operations that help customers and support teams understand the system without treating the appliance as a black box.
• Drive customer-centered product decisions: Work with customers, Product, Support, and Solutions Engineering to understand customer requirements and turn them into pragmatic technical direction. Bring clear opinions, and revise them when customer feedback or production evidence points to a better answer.
• Own production outcomes: Prototype quickly, ship in safe increments, and own rollout, monitoring, incident follow-up, and long-term maintainability.
• Lead across teams: Set architectural direction for major initiatives, write clear technical proposals, conduct rigorous reviews, and mentor other engineers. Build executable plans with Cloudflare WAN, Gateway, DEX, the Cloudflare One Client, and platform and security teams.

Role Requirements Must-Have Skills

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, or equivalent demonstrated impact, building and operating complex production systems.
• Strong software engineering skills in at least one of Rust, Go, TypeScript, or a comparable language, with the ability and willingness to work in other parts of the stack when needed.
• Strong Linux systems and networking knowledge, including routing, TCP/IP, network namespaces, service supervision, firewall, packet and flow debugging, and a tunneling or secure transport technology such as IPsec, WireGuard, GRE, or MASQUE.
• Experience building both Linux-based systems and cloud services, with the debugging skills to trace customer-visible failures across network, device, tunnel, control-plane, and upstream-service boundaries.
• Experience designing distributed control planes, reconciliation or desired-state systems, remote configuration, or another system that manages state across a large and intermittently connected fleet.
• Security judgment appropriate for software deployed inside customer networks, including threat modeling, least privilege, credential and key handling, software supply-chain integrity, and secure lifecycle design.
• A track record of owning ambiguous initiatives from discovery through production, including architecture, implementation, staged deployment, incident response, and failure analysis.
• Technical leadership and communication skills that let you influence decisions, explain system trade-offs to different audiences, and bring engineers and stakeholders toward a clear outcome.
• Product judgment grounded in customer evidence, usability, and operational simplicity.
• Practical experience using AI-assisted engineering tools, coding agents, harnesses, or automation responsibly to improve engineering quality and throughput.

Nice-to-Have Skills

• Experience with SD-WAN, SASE, network operating systems, enterprise edge devices, or products from vendors such as Cisco Meraki, Cato Networks, Fortinet, Juniper, or Palo Alto Networks.
• Experience building custom or embedded Linux distributions with Buildroot, Yocto, or a similar system, and operating immutable or image-based systems using RAUC, bootc, OSTree, or equivalent update technology.
• Experience with UEFI Secure Boot, TPMs, measured boot, hardware-backed identity, or remote attestation.
• Experience packaging and operating virtual network appliances on VMware, KVM, or deploying appliances and network functions in AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
• Experience with high-availability networking, dynamic routing, multi-WAN failover, traffic steering or shaping, application identification, or local policy enforcement.
• Experience with Kubernetes or serverless control planes, event-driven systems, and observability platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana, ClickHouse, or OpenTelemetry.
• Experience designing automated fleet tests, hardware-in-the-loop or network-in-the-loop test environments, safe staged rollouts, and remote diagnostic tooling.

Compensation

• For Colorado based hires: Estimated annual salary of $168,000 - $231,000 USD.
• For Washington based hires: Estimated annual salary of $185,000- $254,000 USD.

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

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!
Please note that applicants who progress to the offer stage of the interview process may be asked to attend an in-person interview within one of the Cloudflare Offices or Cloudflare Hubs. More details about this will be available at that stage of the interview process.
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.
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