Senior Systems Engineer

Role details

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 This is a hands-on software engineering role on the Cloudflare One Appliance team. You will shape and build the Linux-based edge runtime and distributed control plane that connect customer sites to Cloudflare. As a Senior Systems Engineer, you will work across low-level systems, distributed services, and API design while providing technical leadership for major initiatives. Our architecture follows a “light branch, heavy cloud” philosophy: policy and intelligence belong in Cloudflare’s network unless locality is required for correctness, survivability, performance, or user experience. You will use strong technical judgment to decide what belongs to the appliance and what belongs in the Cloudflare's network, building systems that are secure, observable, resilient to 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 a 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 building complex production systems. Strong software engineering skills in Rust, C/C++, Go, or a comparable system programming language, with the ability to work across the stack, including TypeScript. Strong understanding of Linux networking internals, with experience building against the kernel networking stack using eBPF/XDP, netlink, and network namespaces. Experience designing and implementing distributed control planes, desired-state reconciliation, remote configuration, or similar systems that manage large, intermittently connected fleets. Experience designing secure systems, including threat modeling, least privilege, credential handling, and software supply-chain integrity. 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 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 building networking products or systems, such as SD-WAN, SASE, SDN platforms, or network operating systems. Experience building c