Principal Software Engineer, Cloudflare
Workers Deployment & Configuration
$220-303k
+ equity plan
Web performance and security platform
Be an early applicant
Web performance and security platform
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$220-303k
+ equity plan
1001+ employees
Company mission
To help build a better Internet that is bold and ambitious.
Role
Who you are
- Deep experience using Go in production environments
- Experience with JavaScript and TypeScript
- Experience with Kubernetes and metrics/observability tooling such as Prometheus and Grafana, or similar
- Proven history of architecting, expanding, and managing massive distributed infrastructures in live environments
- Track record of owning architecture across multiple teams or systems from concept through global release
- Demonstrated organizational influence through standards-setting, design leadership, cross-team collaboration, and mentoring senior engineers
- Strong ability to design and evolve RESTful APIs with a focus on developer experience
- Track record of increasing team leverage with AI, including evaluating and introducing AI-assisted development and agentic workflows responsibly
Desirable
- Experience with C++ or Rust
- Experience working on a control plane or data plane
- Experience using Cloudflare Workers or Pages
- Experience working in frontend frameworks such as React
- Experience managing interns or mentoring junior engineers
- Product mindset and comfort talking to customers and partners
- Familiarity with GraphQL
- Familiarity with RPC
What the job involves
- Join the Workers Deploy & Config team as a Principal Engineer, the most senior technical role on the team behind Cloudflare’s serverless edge developer platform
- You’ll build the critical large-scale systems that let developers deploy, configure, and manage Workers globally, powering everything from simple static sites to full-stack applications serving millions of users
- This team sits at the foundation of Cloudflare’s developer platform, including Pages and R2. The work spans distributed systems, high-traffic APIs, performance, reliability, and developer experience at global scale
- Lead the architectural evolution of the Workers control plane and help define its multi-year strategy
- Identify high-leverage technical challenges and turn ambiguous problems into actionable engineering paths
- Re-engineer core services to keep ahead of exponential traffic growth
- Architect foundational primitives that unlock new product capabilities and categories
- Own the stability and efficiency of a core customer-facing system
- Establish rigorous benchmarks for API responsiveness, availability, and reliability
- Participate in on-call to help maintain global platform availability
- Collaborate with Product and engineering leadership to shape future roadmaps
- Serve as the primary technical representative for Workers Deploy & Config in major design forums
- Mentor mid-level and senior engineers and raise overall engineering standards
- Investigate and apply emerging technologies to improve the developer platform
Our take
Cloudflare is a multi-service global network that provides web security and infrastructure, DDoS mitigation services, and a content delivery network. Founded in 2009, Cloudflare has risen to become an industry giant, with over 25 million global internet properties on its network.
Cloudflare has been responsible for a number of admirable initiatives, offering free web protection to human rights groups, journalists, artists, and US election websites. This goes some way to counteracting the flak Cloudflare has received in some circles for the controversial groups and users who use its services. This chequered history, however, has not affected its over 80% market share in the content delivery network field.
This is perhaps in part because it has proven sharp at staying abreast of the rapidly morphing tech and digital space and customer demands. For example, Cloudflare is shifting to 100% renewable energy usage to create a zero-emissions internet, and in 2020 released a feature that would help users navigate data privacy regulations by selecting where their data is stored.
And impressive third-quarter 2025 results show strong momentum, with revenue rising to $562 million from $430 million a year earlier. The company also raised its full-year guidance, underscoring confidence in continued growth. As demand for secure, cloud-based infrastructure keeps growing, Cloudflare's expanding platform and improving efficiency leave it well positioned to capture further gains in a rapidly growing market.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
16% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Company benefits
- Competitive pay: We offer a competitive total rewards package, where every employee is an owner of our stock.
- Take-what-you-need vacation: We encourage employees to find a comfortable work-life balance by taking as many days off as they need while still being able to perform their jobs satisfactorily. (We really mean it!)
- Paid maternity & paternity leave: Our global parental leave policy allows up to sixteen paid weeks of bonding leave time for all qualifying new parents.
- Employee benefits: We offer a comprehensive benefits package including healthcare, life insurance, short- and long-term disability, pension plans in accordance with the market practice in our locations.
- Commuter program: We are flexible about where we work and value connecting at the office. Our commuter benefits program is in place to support team members' commute to work via public transportation without the extra cost burden.
- Wellbeing: Global offerings that provide mental health, childcare and family forming support to our employees across our offices.
Company HQ
China Basin, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Lee Holloway
(Co-Founder & Lead Engineer)Lee began their career as an Engineer at Homewarehouse for a year before working at Unspam Technologies for 4 years. They co-created Project Honey Pot in 2004 and Cloudflare in March 2009, serving as Lead Engineer of both to present.
Michelle Zatlyn
(Co-Founder, President & Co-Chair)Having worked for Investor Economics and I Love Rewards for a combined 4 years, Michelle worked at Toshiba for 3 years as a Product Manager. She then co-founded Cloudflare in 2009 as COO, and has served as President since 2020. She is also a Board Member at Atlassian.
Matthew Prince
(Co-Founder & CEO)Matthew studied for an MBA at Harvard Business School before co-founding Unspam Technologies in December 2001, and Cloudflare in 2009, where he has served as CEO ever since.
Salary benchmarks
We don't have enough data yet to provide salary benchmarks for this role.
Submit your salary to help other candidates with crowdsourced salary estimates.
Share this job
View 111 more jobs at Cloudflare