Vice President of Talent Acquisition & Strategy, Cloudflare
$375-400k
This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan
Web performance and security platform
Open for applications
Web performance and security platform
1001+ employees
Open for applications
$375-400k
This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan
1001+ employees
Company mission
To help build a better Internet that is bold and ambitious.
Role
Who you are
- Ideal Non-Traditional Backgrounds: We highly value senior people leaders from Management Consulting, Investment Banking, Engineering, Sales or corporate strategy environments, other functions within people leadership, where problem-solving begins with systems-level modeling, rigorous data diagnostics, and structural thinking
- Infrastructure Tech Deep Roots: Prior leadership experience at a SaaS, cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, consumer, company where keeping a world-class technical bar is foundational to the company's success
- Organizational Agility: Experience successfully guiding talent operations through corporate reorganizations, high-growth scaling phases, or post-acquisition integrations with clear intent and structure
- Compensation Architecture Fluency: Strong familiarity with market data platforms (Radford, Levels.fyi, Carta) and an understanding of equity design and localized compensation bands to help structure complex executive offers seamlessly
- Global Scope: Direct experience scaling international tech hubs (specifically across EMEA and APJC), including a strong working knowledge of cross-border talent mobilization and regional employment practices
What the job involves
- Reports to: VP, Talent
- As our Vice President of Talent Acquisition & Strategy, you will be the chief architect of our human capital infrastructure and lead a global team of customer obsessed recruiters and operators. You will design a predictive, highly automated talent system—one that maps company growth to workforce requirements, isolates where human judgment is irreplaceable, and deploys AI agents to handle the repetitive mechanics
- We are looking for a visionary leader and highly operational leader whose instinct isn’t to simply deploy a traditional recruiting playbook, but to model the organizational system, identify the core constraints, and ship elegant, scalable solutions
- Cloudflare’s internal AI agent usage has increased exponentially, with our teams running thousands of daily agent sessions to build, ship, and scale products. This is our default operating rhythm
- Our talent acquisition strategy reflects this modern architecture. In the agentic AI era, you will lead the function that answers the ultimate organizational question: how do we optimize for the roles that require uniquely human capabilities?
- You will focus our human hiring pipelines on where human capital matters most: deep creative judgment, complex systems problem-solving, and intense relationship depth. Every talent strategy you implement is a high-impact design choice for Cloudflare’s future organizational capacity
- Thinking Backward from the Customer: Treat our candidates and hiring managers as your ultimate customers. You will design the entire talent acquisition architecture by thinking backward from their experience—ensuring unmatched speed, absolute transparency, and mutual respect for everyone’s time
- Outcomes Over Process: Ruthlessly eliminate "process for process's sake." You believe that workflows exist to enable great hiring, not to create bureaucratic hurdles. You will empower your team to be agile, adaptive, and focused on delivering high-quality matches rather than checking compliance boxes
- Enterprise Strategy: Partner with executive leadership to translate Cloudflare’s long-term product roadmaps and financial models into a predictive, multi-year global talent strategy
- Pipeline Instrumentation: Build and monitor a highly data-driven talent funnel. Instrument key metrics—funnel health, passive-to-active conversion velocity, segment-specific time-to-fill, and quality-of-hire at the 6 and 12-month marks—to continuously tune the engine
- AI-First Operations: Seamlessly deploy and scale AI agents across sourcing workflows, initial technical screening, scheduling logistics, and candidate communication loops to free up your team for deep relationship building
- Peer-Level Alignment: Earn deep trust with our organizations through genuine technical fluency
- Market Intelligence: Bring proactive talent market insights to organizational design conversations, advising leaders on global talent pool elasticity, compensation trends, and site selection before hiring needs even arise
- Inspirational Leadership: Lead, mentor, and elevate a global team of recruiters, technical sourcers, operational specialists, and passionate members of our team globally
- Global Compliance Velocity: Maintain uncompromised data privacy and regulatory compliance (GDPR, pay transparency, local employment laws) across the US, EMEA, and APAC
- Authentic Narrative: Position Cloudflare’s employer brand as an authentic reflection of our culture, attracting builders and sellers who are passionate about shaping an AI-first Internet
- Future Talent Pipelines: Run early-career, university, and diversity recruiting initiatives with the same structured, metrics-driven approach applied to our senior staff engineering hires
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.
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