Senior Systems Engineer
Cloudflare18 days ago
Base Salary
$156k - $254k/yr
Responsibilities
- Design and implement end-to-end capabilities across the cloud control plane, Linux appliance runtime, telemetry pipeline, and deployment environments.
- Develop and harden Linux networking and appliance dataplane capabilities using IPsec, MASQUE, eBPF, and Linux kernel networking primitives.
- Build distributed control-plane and state-management systems for reliable configuration and command delivery across intermittently connected device fleets.
- Implement secure device lifecycle capabilities including hardware-backed identity, attestation, secure boot, immutable operating-system images, credential rotation, and staged over-the-air upgrades.
- Design telemetry, diagnostics, synthetic tests, support bundles, and remote operations for appliance observability and supportability.
- Work with customers, Product, Support, Solutions Engineering, and platform teams to turn requirements and production evidence into technical direction.
- Own architecture, implementation, staged rollout, monitoring, incident follow-up, failure analysis, and long-term maintainability.
- Set architectural direction, write technical proposals, conduct reviews, mentor engineers, and lead cross-team initiatives.
Requirements
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience building complex production systems.
- Strong skills in Rust, C/C++, Go, or a comparable systems programming language, including the ability to work with TypeScript.
- Strong understanding of Linux networking internals and experience with eBPF/XDP, netlink, and network namespaces.
- Experience designing distributed control planes, desired-state reconciliation, remote configuration, or similar systems for large intermittently connected fleets.
- Experience designing secure systems, including threat modeling, least privilege, credential handling, and software supply-chain integrity.
- Experience owning ambiguous initiatives from discovery through architecture, implementation, staged deployment, incident response, and failure analysis.
- Technical leadership, communication, stakeholder-influence, and system trade-off communication skills.
- Product judgment grounded in customer evidence, usability, and operational simplicity.
- Practical experience using AI-assisted engineering tools, coding agents, harnesses, or automation responsibly.
- Preferred experience includes networking products such as SD-WAN, SASE, SDN platforms, or network operating systems.
- Preferred experience includes custom or embedded Linux distributions and immutable image-based update systems such as RAUC, bootc, or OSTree.
- Preferred experience includes UEFI Secure Boot, TPMs, hardware-backed identity, remote attestation, high-availability failover, dynamic routing, multi-WAN, traffic steering or shaping, application identification, and local policy enforcement.
- Preferred experience includes fleet tests, hardware-in-the-loop or network-in-the-loop test environments, staged rollouts, and remote diagnostic tooling.
Benefits
- U.S. benefits include medical/Rx, dental, vision, flexible spending, commuter spending, fertility and family-forming benefits, mental health support, Employee Assistance Program, and global travel medical insurance.
- Financial benefits include short- and long-term disability, life and accident insurance, a 401(k) retirement savings plan, and an employee stock participation plan.
- Flexible paid time off and leave programs including parental, pregnancy health, medical, and bereavement leave.
- The role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare's equity plan.
- The role is available in Atlanta, Austin, Denver, Seattle, and Washington DC; candidates reaching the offer stage may be asked to attend an in-person interview at a Cloudflare office or hub.
About Cloudflare
Cloudflare builds a global network that provides CDN, DDoS mitigation, DNS, Zero Trust security, and developer/edge computing tools for organizations of all sizes. It sells subscriptions to its cloud-based platform and usage-based services that protect and accelerate web sites, APIs, and corporate networks, plus serverless apps via Workers. Founded in 2009 and headquartered in San Francisco, it is a public company traded on the NYSE (ticker: NET).