Senior Systems Engineer
Cloudflare2 months ago
Base Salary
$168k - $231k/yr
Responsibilities
- Design and implement capabilities across the cloud control plane, Linux appliance runtime, telemetry pipeline, and physical, virtual, and cloud deployment environments.
- Develop and harden the Linux-based appliance dataplane using secure networking technologies such as IPsec, MASQUE, eBPF, and Linux kernel networking primitives.
- Build distributed control-plane and state-management systems that deliver configuration and commands safely across large device fleets.
- Implement hardware-backed identity, attestation, secure boot, immutable operating-system images, credential rotation, staged over-the-air upgrades, rollback, and recovery.
- Design telemetry, diagnostics, synthetic tests, support bundles, and remote operations for customers and support teams.
- Work with customers, Product, Support, and Solutions Engineering to translate requirements into pragmatic technical direction.
- Own prototyping, incremental shipping, rollout, monitoring, incident follow-up, and long-term maintainability.
- Set architectural direction, write technical proposals, conduct reviews, mentor engineers, and build plans with Cloudflare WAN, Gateway, DEX, the Cloudflare One Client, and platform and security teams.
Requirements
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, or equivalent demonstrated impact, building and operating complex production systems.
- Strong software engineering skills in Rust, Go, TypeScript, or a comparable language, with willingness to work across the stack.
- Strong Linux systems and networking knowledge, including routing, TCP/IP, network namespaces, service supervision, firewalling, packet and flow debugging, and tunneling or secure transport technologies.
- Experience building Linux-based systems and cloud services and debugging failures across network, device, tunnel, control-plane, and upstream-service boundaries.
- Experience designing distributed control planes, reconciliation or desired-state systems, remote configuration, or systems managing state across large intermittently connected fleets.
- Security judgment covering threat modeling, least privilege, credential and key handling, software supply-chain integrity, and secure lifecycle design.
- Experience owning ambiguous initiatives from discovery through production, including architecture, implementation, staged deployment, incident response, and failure analysis.
- Technical leadership, communication, systems trade-off analysis, and stakeholder-influence 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 with SD-WAN, SASE, network operating systems, enterprise edge devices, or products from Cisco Meraki, Cato Networks, Fortinet, Juniper, or Palo Alto Networks.
- Preferred experience building custom or embedded Linux distributions with Buildroot, Yocto, or similar systems and operating immutable or image-based systems with RAUC, bootc, OSTree, or equivalent technology.
- Preferred experience with UEFI Secure Boot, TPMs, measured boot, hardware-backed identity, or remote attestation.
- Preferred experience packaging and operating virtual network appliances on VMware or KVM and deploying appliances or network functions in AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
- Preferred experience with high-availability networking, dynamic routing, multi-WAN failover, traffic steering or shaping, application identification, or local policy enforcement.
- Preferred experience with Kubernetes, serverless control planes, event-driven systems, and observability platforms.
- Preferred experience designing automated fleet tests, hardware-in-the-loop or network-in-the-loop test environments, safe staged rollouts, and remote diagnostic tooling.
Benefits
- Medical/Rx, dental, and vision insurance
- Flexible spending and commuter spending accounts
- Fertility and family-forming benefits
- On-demand mental health support and Employee Assistance Program
- Global travel medical insurance
- Short- and long-term disability, life, and accident insurance
- 401(k) retirement savings plan and employee stock participation plan
- Flexible paid time off and parental, pregnancy health, medical, and bereavement leave
- Available in Austin, Atlanta, Denver, and Seattle; an in-person interview may be required at a Cloudflare office or hub
- Role is eligible for Cloudflare’s equity plan
Tech Stack
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).