Senior Systems Engineer, Browser Isolation

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. Available Locations: Austin, TX (US), Lisbon (Portugal), London (UK) About the team Cloudflare Browser Isolation runs web content in remote browsers, helping protect users from threats while preserving a responsive browsing experience. Our team builds the Chromium-based browsing engine, remote rendering and streaming technology, and distributed services that manage browser sessions across Cloudflare’s global network. You will work at the intersection of systems programming, distributed systems, and security. Engineers contribute across the product, collaborating on browser changes, service orchestration, observability, and build infrastructure. Scope and growth At this level, you will be accountable for outcomes across a problem area that may span several components. You will establish technical direction, make uncertainty and trade-offs explicit, and help other engineers succeed while remaining hands-on. This is an individual-contributor role; people-management experience is not required. Technologies we use Browser engine: Chromium and C++. Systems programming: Rust. Distributed services and orchestration: Go, TypeScript, Cloudflare Workers, Nomad, and Consul. Remote rendering and streaming: WebRTC and Skia. Browser client: TypeScript, WebAssembly, and WebGL. What you will do Lead complex, multi-component initiatives from problem definition and design through implementation, staged rollout, and measurable production outcomes. Design and implement changes in our Chromium-based C++ browser and the distributed services and systems components supporting remote browsing, working across Go, Rust, and TypeScript. Make and explain architectural trade-offs across latency, availability, resource efficiency, security boundaries, and operational complexity. Investigate difficult cross-layer failures and performance bottlenecks, distinguishing browser, host, network, and control-plane causes. Improve resilience, capacity management, observability, and release safety; define success metrics and validate results. Coordinate work with partner teams, surface dependencies and risks early, and guide delivery through ambiguity. Mentor engineers and raise the quality of code reviews, design reviews, testing, documentation, and operational practices. Participate in the team’s production on-call rotation after onboarding, lead technical incident investigations as needed, and drive durable corrective actions. This role may require flexibility to be on-call outside of standard working hours to address technical issues as needed. Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience Strong production C++ proficiency, including memory and resource ownership, concurrency, and debugging in substantial codebases. A track record of independently leading complex systems or distributed-service improvements across multiple components, from an unclear problem to a reliable production outcome. Strong Linux/UNIX and networking fundamentals, with experience diagnosing correctness, latency, and resource-consumption issues using profiling and operational evidence. Experience designing and operating distributed systems, with sound judgment about service boundaries, data partitioning, consistency, timeouts and retries, backpressure, capacity limits, and recovery from partial failures. Experience designing safe rollout and recovery strategies and maintaining production software over its lifecycle. Ability to communicate trade-offs clearly, align stakeholders, mentor teammates, and improve engineering practices through constructive feedback. A willingness to work across C++, Rust, Go, and TypeScript and learn unfamiliar parts of the stack. Bonus Points These are preferred qualifications, not prerequisites. Prior Browser Isolation or Cloudflare experience is not required. Browser engines, Chromium, browser sandboxing, or security-sensitive systems. Low-latency streaming, graphics, remote computing, or other real-time systems. Container and workload orchestration, including Nomad or Kubernetes, and service discovery. Experience using Rust for systems programming or distributed services. Go or TypeScript; WebRTC, Skia, WebAssembly, or WebGL. Production observability, capacity planning, incident response, or build and release infrastructure. Compensation For Portugal based hires: Estimated annual salary is between €66,000 - €91,000. The final offer will be inclusive of time exemption, in alignment with the applicable law and coll