Software Engineer, DDoS

Available locations:Hybrid - Austin, US | Lisbon, Portugal | London, UK
Remote - US
About the team
The mission of the DDoS engineering team at Cloudflare is to make DDoS attacks a thing of the past. We create Internet-scale systems that analyze and mitigate the largest DDoS attacks in the world. Our systems operate across one of the largest networks on the Internet and protect nearly 20% of all websites. Because of our scale and reach, we're consistently on the front line in the battle against new and emerging threats, and the work we do on this team has an outsized impact in helping Cloudflare build a better Internet.
Our team is responsible for a large number of different systems. Our tooling and mitigation systems are primarily written in Rust, but we also use Lua, C, and eBPF. Our analytics systems are primarily written in Go, and they leverage Kafka and ClickHouse. All of our analysis and mitigation operates in real-time to process massive amounts of data.
What you'll do
Your most important responsibility as a member of the DDoS engineering team is to ensure that Cloudflare and our customers remain available in the face of DDoS attacks. Toward that end, your job will be to help us enhance the automation that detects and blocks attack traffic. Some examples of potential future project work include building continuous profiling systems to understand customer traffic patterns, monitoring the health of customer origins, building new ways to customize detection and mitigation behavior, and enriching analytics to provide customers with more actionable data.
Responsibilities

• Build and enhance the software that automates DDoS detection and mitigation
• Analyze data and identify patterns to strengthen our attack detection and mitigation
• Build and enhance the internal tooling that supports our systems
• Monitor telemetry to improve performance and ensure system health
• Communicate your knowledge and expertise of DDoS within the broader organization
• Provide last-line support for SOC and Escalation Engineers, which can require off-hours availability in extraordinary cases

Examples of desirable knowledge and experience

• Knowledge of core Internet protocols (IP, TCP, UDP, DNS, TLS, HTTP, HTTP/2, HTTP/3, QUIC)
• Knowledge of common types of network and application-layer DDoS attacks
• Knowledge of common web application architectures
• Experience with Rust, C, Go, or other systems languages
• Experience building large-scale distributed systems
• Experience analyzing large time-series datasets, preferably including SQL
• Experience with the Linux network stack, and specifically eBPF
• Experience with Prometheus, Grafana, and Kibana
• Experience with SaltStack and Kubernetes

A higher-education degree is not required for this role.