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! 

About the Role

An engineering role at Cloudflare provides an opportunity to address some big challenges, at scale.  We believe that with our talented team, we can solve some of the biggest security, reliability and performance problems facing the Internet. Just how big?  

• We have in excess of 15 Terabits of network transit capacity
• We operate 250 Points-of-presence around the world
• We serve more traffic than Twitter, Amazon, Apple, Instagram, Bing, & Wikipedia combined
• Anytime we push code, it immediately affects over 200 million internet users
• Every day, up to 20,000 new customers sign-up for Cloudflare service
• Every week, the average Internet user touches us more than 500 times

We are looking for talented Software Engineers to build and develop the platform which makes Cloudflare customers place their trust in us.  Our Software Engineers come from a variety of technical backgrounds and have built up their knowledge working in different environments. But the common factors across all of our reliability-focused engineers include a passion for automation, scalability, and operational excellence.  Our Infrastructure Engineering team focuses on the automation to scale our infrastructure.

Our team is well-funded and focused on building an extraordinary company.  This is a superb opportunity to join a high-performing team and scale our high-growth network as Cloudflare’s business grows.  You will build tools to constantly improve our scale and speed of deployment.  You will nurture a passion for an “automate everything” approach that makes systems failure-resistant and ready-to-scale.   

Cloudflare Software Engineers focus on automating our infrastructure installations and decommissions at scale.  We enable our Data Centre Engineering teams by allowing them to install new data centers, replace servers and networking in existing data centers as quickly and efficiently as possible while not impacting existing infrastructure and customer services.  While our focus is on automating all infrastructure requirements, there is an element of ongoing operational support of Data Center Engineers and other teams.  We also review upcoming hardware changes and update automation and configuration management to cater to these advances.

Many of our Software Engineers have had the opportunity to work at multiple offices on interim and long-term project assignments. The ideal Software Engineering candidate has a passionate curiosity about how the Internet fundamentally works and has a strong knowledge of Linux and Hardware.  We require strong coding ability in Bash, Python or Go. We prefer to hire experienced candidates; however raw skill trumps experience and we welcome strong junior applicants.

Requisite Skills

• Intermediate level software development skills in Python and Go
• Linux systems administration experience
• 5 years of relevant Development experience
• Strong skills in network services, including Rest APIs and HTTP

Examples of desirable skills, knowledge and experience

• 5 years of relevant work experience
• Strong tooling and automations development experience
• Network fundamentals DHCP, ARP, subnetting, routing, firewalls, IPv6
• Configuration management systems such as Saltstack, Chef, Puppet or Ansible
• Load balancing and reverse proxies such as Nginx, Varnish, HAProxy, Apache
• SQL databases (Postgres or MySQL)
• Time series databases (OpenTSDB, Graphite, Prometheus)
• The ability to understand service and device metrics and visualize them using Grafana
• Key/Value stores (Redis, KyotoTycoon, Cassandra, LevelDB)

Bonus Points

• Experience programming in C, C++, Rust or Go
• Experience with continuous / rapid release engineering
• Experience developing systems that are highly available and redundant across regions
• High-bandwidth transit Internetworking and routing experience
• Performance analysis and debugging with tools like perf, sar, strace, dtrace
• Experience with the Linux kernel and Linux software packaging
• Internetworking and BGP

Some tools that we use

• Apache Airflow 
• Salt
• Netbox
• Docker
• Kubernetes
• Nginx
• Python
• PostgreSQL
• Redis
• Prometheus

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.