Principal Systems Engineer, Cloudflare
Internal Go-to-Market Tools
This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan and ESPP
More information about location
Web performance and security platform
Be an early applicant
Web performance and security platform
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan and ESPP
More information about location
1001+ employees
Company mission
To help build a better Internet that is bold and ambitious.
Role
Who you are
- 10+ years of software engineering experience with a demonstrated history of leading complex, organization-wide data initiatives
- Deep expertise in building distributed systems and production infrastructure at scale, with proficiency in Go and strong working knowledge of TypeScript
- Exceptional ability to navigate ambiguous problem spaces, identify the highest-impact technical work, and drive projects autonomously from conception through adoption—balancing pragmatic execution with long-term technical excellence
- Deep analytical SQL and data modeling experience. Proven ability to manage complexity even at thousands of tables
- Able to debug database and query performance issues using profiling tools and source code where applicable
- Please be prepared to discuss specific examples of organization-wide technical initiatives you've led, particularly distributed systems or data infrastructure and their measurable business impact
Desirable
- Previous experience as a Principal Engineer, Staff+ engineer, or technical leader on platform, infrastructure, or task force teams that operate outside traditional product roadmaps with a focus on enabling GTM organizations
- Columnar/OLAP or lakehouse experience (ClickHouse, DuckDB, BigQuery, Snowflake, Iceberg, Starrocks).Familiarity with the Salesforce data model and CRM/API integrations
- Familiarity with deploying to bare metal and Kubernetes
- Experience on Cloudflare Workers / edge platforms and analytics-engineering (dbt) workflows
- Background in SaaS or product-led growth (PLG) GTM motions
What the job involves
- Created in January 2025, our centralized Developer Go-to-Market (GTM) organization functions as a "speedboat" to maintain focus, control direction, and iterate quickly
- Our mission is to build long-term relationships with developers by addressing their unique needs and challenges with specialized attention and resources
- Our team operates across four core pillars: Marketing, Developer Relations, Growth Programs, and Sales
- These functions work in close collaboration to support customers throughout their journey, from raising awareness and inspiring new use cases to driving platform adoption, consumption, and scaling customer relationships
- Each function amplifies the impact of the others through strategic partnerships and shared insights
- You'll own the GTM-facing software and data products our sales motion runs on, end to end
- That includes the data foundation underneath it and the signals that flag which accounts a rep should act on and when
- You'll also lead our hardest cross-functional projects, the ones that span many teams and systems
- You'll drive them to delivery, keep partner teams on track, and do it with a lot of autonomy
- Day to day you'll improve how we visualize pipeline, build sales tools that flag the right moment to reach out to a customer, and make the developer buying journey smoother
- The work is a mix of data engineering, full-stack product, and applied AI, and you'll build it on Cloudflare's own developer platform
- This role fits someone who works well in a fast-paced, ambiguous environment, likes turning messy business problems into working software, and can juggle several priorities at once
- Design and implement features in a Golang, Typescript and SQL
- Build and operate production services on Cloudflare Workers and Kubernetes
- Own the data foundation including Query Engine, Workflows, MCP/APIs and other internal facing products and services
- Own projects end to end; from design docs and schema changes through implementation, testing, deployment, and production monitoring
- Participate in on call rotations, drive incident resolution, and write postmortems that improve reliability
- Use AI tools extensively to accelerate development, debugging, and operational tasks. We expect engineers to leverage AI as a core part of their workflow
- Collaborate across teams to coordinate capacity planning, API contracts, and cross cutting initiatives
- Embed with Sales, Marketing, Developer Relations (DevRel), and Growth to turn fuzzy operational pain into shipped software
- Help set the standard for GTM engineering organization wide
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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