Senior Software Engineer, Cloudflare
Distributed Systems,
Web performance and security platform
Open for applications
Web performance and security platform
1001+ employees
Open for applications
1001+ employees
Company mission
Cloudflare's mission is to help build a better Internet that is bold and ambitious.
Role
Who you are
- Understanding at the protocol level, including the differences between what the specs say, and what actually happens on the Internet
- Confidence to work in multiple programming languages - could include C, Go, Rust, Python, Lua and even PHP
- Experience (and love) for debugging to ensure the system works in all cases
- Strong systems level programming skills
- Excited by the idea of optimizing complex solutions to general problems
- Experience with a continuous integration workflow and using source control (we use git)
- Good Unix knowledge, patches to Operating Systems a huge plus for some roles
- Understanding of security issues and responsibilities
- Experience with monitoring, alerting and debugging high volume production systems
- Fluent in analyses of data sets such as logs
- Designing and building APIs
- Great oral and written communications skills
- Desire to learn and improve
- Willing and eager to share knowledge, and mentor
What the job involves
- As a Distributed Systems Engineer at Cloudflare, you’ll work on the code that runs close to the end user, runs at a massive scale, and is deployed to 250+ cities around the world
- A TLS/HTTP proxy to make the connection from eyeball to edge as fast and secure as possible
- Filtering malicious traffic and handling good traffic according to customer configuration
- Content optimization that takes content served from customer sites and makes it more performant
- A platform that runs “serverless” Workers and provides a key value store
- A reverse-proxy system that caches customer website content according to customer configuration
- Optimization of connections from Cloudflare to our customers' origin servers to reduce their load and increase performance
- Our Authoritative DNS server and our public resolver 1.1.1.1
- One of the biggest data pipelines in the world, operating at well over 25M events per second
- We operate some of the fastest, and most widely distributed services on the Internet. Your work will focus on building robust, secure, and high performance distributed systems. We are a small engineering team operating at a massive scale, so what you do will have a huge impact
Salary benchmarks
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 around 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.
The cloud infrastructure market reached $53 billion in 2022. While the Big 3 (Amazon, Microsoft, and Google) own 65% of the market, that still leaves billions of dollars left for companies such as Cloudflare. Its ambitious and successful work is likely to continue being a crucial feature of the web, but in 2023, placed it in the crosshairs of hackers looking to exploit its infrastructure. The beginning of 2024 saw Cloudflare vow to bolster its security and patch vulnerabilities.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Few candidates hear
back within 2 weeks
16% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Company benefits
- Minimum 8 weeks of paid parental leave
- Equal opportunity employer
- Unlimited paid time off policy
- Work from home opportunities
- Medical, Dental & Vision Insurance
- Life Insurance, Disability Insurance
- 401(k) plans
- Family planning and fertility program
- Gym discounts
- Commuter Benefits Program
Company values
- Principled - We create our products and features with a global mindset and democratize important and innovative technologies that drive adoption of the latest standards
- Curious - Our team is made up of pioneering innovators that approach new challenges with interest and a desire to learn
- Transparent - We hold ourselves accountable when we make mistakes—and we do everything we can to learn from them
Company HQ
China Basin, San Francisco, CA
Articles
Leadership
Lee Holloway
(Lead Engineer)Lee started 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
(President & COO)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
(CEO)Matthew studied for an MBA at Harvard Business School before co-founding Unspam Technologies in December 2001, and Cloudflare as CEO in March 2009.
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