At Cloudflare, we have our eyes set on an ambitious goal: to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world’s largest networks that powers approximately 25 million 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! 

Cloudflare is a distributed system and provides infrastructure that spans the globe, on a mission to make the internet better, safer, and more performant everyday. As one of the systems optimization engineers working on the Cloudflare Infrastructure team you will need to make thoughtful infrastructure systems, both Hardware (HW) and Software (SW), optimization choices affecting a significant portion of the Internet. 

Our team focuses on evaluating and delivering new infrastructure and optimizing our current/future infrastructure enabling the best use and efficiency of our compute, storage, and network. As an Infrastructure Systems (HW/SW) Optimization Engineer, you will work with colleagues across our Hardware System Engineering team and with our internal partners - Software Engineering, Production/Performance Engineering, Product teams, and Sourcing teams to drive optimization experiments, evaluate and tune our software stack for greater efficiency of our current hardware infrastructure and help and inform decisions, based on software and workload performance, on new hardware/architectures being deployed.

Examples of desirable skills, knowledge and experience

• Confidence to work in multiple programming languages - including C/C++, Go, Rust, Java, Python, Lua and other high performance languages
• Experience (and love) for debugging to ensure the system works in all cases
• Strong systems level programming skills
• Excellent Linux operating system knowledge, patches to Operating Systems, and lightweight virtualization/VMM knowledge is a huge plus
• Excited by the idea of optimizing complex distributed systems, discovering system bottlenecks and proposing solutions to solve in current system architecture or to inform future software/hardware development
• Experience with a continuous integration workflow and using source control (we use git)
• Knowledgeable about compute, storage, network hardware architecture, validation, performance benchmarking, debugging, and edge/datacenter deployment models - experience in serverless a big plus
• Understanding of security issues and responsibilities
• Experience with monitoring, alerting and debugging high volume production systems
• Previous experience in testing, measuring, and/or simulating hardware and software performance/benchmarking and an understanding of no-stone-left-unturned experimentation
• Fluent in analyses of data sets such as logs
• Excellent at developing tools and automation to evaluate and optimize system HW/SW performance
• Eager to work with internal HW engineering team to help validate, debug and proactively identify opportunities to maintain the most performant, power efficient and cost effective next-generation compute hardware and firmware for Cloudflare’s system software, services and workloads
• Excited to drive experiments on different system HW and SW optimizations working cross-functionally with Performance, Software Engineering, Hardware Engineering, Sourcing, and Product teams to deploy your recommendations globally
• Track record of driving engineering projects from idea to experiment to implementation
• Great oral and written communications skills
• Desire to learn and improve
• Willing and eager to mentor and share your knowledge internally and externally

Bonus Points

• Experience with Lua, Rust or Go (or a strong desire to learn)
• Experience with Javascript or Typescript
• Experience with a web server / reverse proxy system (NGINX, Apache, Varnish)
• Experience in deploying SaaS in different infrastructures at scale (hyperscale cloud, edge/ distributed system infrastructure)

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: We equip politically and artistically important organizations and journalists 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: We created 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.

Path Forward Partnership: Since 2016, we have partnered with Path Forward, a nonprofit organization, to create 16-week positions for mid-career professionals who want to get back to the workplace after taking time off to care for a child, parent, or loved one.

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.