Principal Software Engineer, Cloudflare
Enterprise Integrations
This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare's equity plan
More information about location
Web performance and security platform
Open for applications
Web performance and security platform
1001+ employees
Open for applications
This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare's equity plan
More information about location
1001+ employees
Company mission
To help build a better Internet that is bold and ambitious.
Role
Who you are
- This role requires navigating ambiguity, adapting technical strategy as conditions change, and building alignment across engineering and business stakeholders
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent work experience
- 10+ years of professional software engineering experience as a guideline
- Proficiency in at least one backend language
- Experience with LLM APIs (Anthropic, OpenAI, etc.)
- Experience with AI guardrails/governance best practices
- Demonstrated experience delivering AI-enabled systems beyond experimentation. Candidates should be able to explain their individual contribution, evaluation approach, production constraints, failure modes, and measurable outcomes
- Demonstrated experience influencing technical culture and best practices without authority
- Familiarity with integration patterns (pub/sub, API-first, CDM, batch processing)
- Experience working with stakeholders to solve business problems through integration or automation solutions
- Experience building APIs with proper security and operational practices
- Experience with observability tooling (e.g. Grafana, Prometheus, Sentry, Kibana, Splunk or similar)
- Working familiarity with containerized/cloud environments (Kubernetes, or equivalent cloud-native experience)
- Experience with serverless computing platforms (e.g. AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Azure Functions, or Cloudflare Workers)
- Experience with GitLab or other CI/CD tooling
- Willingness to participate in an on-call rotation for roughly one week every two months
Desirable
- Experience with business financial systems, such as Oracle or NetSuite
- Experience with PostgreSQL
- Experience with Cloudflare Developer Platform (Workers, Workflows, D1, etc.)
- Experience with Go, Python and TypeScript
What the job involves
- We’re looking for a Principal Engineer to establish technical direction across Enterprise Applications and help teams turn that direction into reliable, incremental delivery. You’ll design systems, lead complex cross-team initiatives, influence engineering practices, and remain hands-on with implementation where your contribution has the greatest leverage
- You’ll model responsible AI-assisted engineering, operational excellence, sound judgment, and attention to detail
- Establish and communicate technical strategy across multiple teams, translating long-term direction into incremental delivery plans
- Lead complex, cross-functional initiatives from problem definition through architecture, implementation, deployment, and operation
- Influence technical decisions across teams through design reviews, prototypes, standards, mentoring, and hands-on contributions
- Build and extend AI-enabled systems, including agents, evaluation frameworks, MCP servers, and workflow automation
- Determine when AI is appropriate and when deterministic software offers a safer, simpler, or more reliable solution
- Establish practices for evaluating AI systems, including quality, reliability, security, cost, latency, and human oversight
- Improve engineering effectiveness through reusable platforms, operational tooling, automated diagnostics, and development workflows
- Partner with business and technical stakeholders to convert ambiguous problems into clear technical strategies and measurable outcomes
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 166 more jobs at Cloudflare