Responsibilities
- Build systems end to end: Design and implement capabilities spanning the cloud control plane, Linux appliance runtime, telemetry pipeline, and physical, virtual, and cloud deployment environments.
- Build the Linux-based networking platform: Develop and harden the appliance dataplane using technologies such as IPsec, MASQUE, eBPF, and Linux kernel networking primitives.
- Engineer reliable fleet control: Build distributed control-plane and state-management systems that safely deliver configuration and commands, tolerate intermittent connectivity and partial failures, converge to known-good state, and support zero-touch operation across large device fleets.
- Secure the device lifecycle: Improve hardware-backed identity, attestation, secure boot, immutable operating-system images, credential rotation, and staged over-the-air upgrades with safe rollback and recovery.
- Make operability a product feature: Design telemetry, diagnostics, synthetic tests, support bundles, and remote operations.
- Drive customer-centered product decisions: Work with customers, Product, Support, and Solutions Engineering to understand requirements and turn them into technical direction.
- Own production outcomes: Prototype quickly, ship in safe increments, and own rollout, monitoring, incident follow-up, and long-term maintainability.
- Lead across teams: Set architectural direction for major initiatives, write technical proposals, conduct reviews, and mentor other engineers. Build executable plans with Cloudflare WAN, Gateway, DEX, the Cloudflare One Client, and platform and security teams.
Role Requirements
Must-Have Skills
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating complex production systems.
- Strong software engineering skills in at least one of Rust, Go, TypeScript, or comparable language.
- Strong Linux systems and networking knowledge, including routing, TCP/IP, network namespaces, service supervision, firewall, packet and flow debugging, and tunneling or secure transport technology such as IPsec, WireGuard, GRE, or MASQUE.
- Experience building both Linux-based systems and cloud services, with debugging skills to trace 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 for software in customer networks, including threat modeling, least privilege, credential and key handling, software supply-chain integrity, and secure lifecycle design.
- Track record of owning ambiguous initiatives from discovery through production.
- Technical leadership and communication skills to influence decisions and explain trade-offs.
- Product judgment grounded in customer evidence, usability, and operational simplicity.
- Practical experience using AI-assisted engineering tools, coding agents, harnesses, or automation.
Nice-to-Have Skills
- Experience with SD-WAN, SASE, network operating systems, enterprise edge devices, or products from Cisco Meraki, Cato Networks, Fortinet, Juniper, or Palo Alto Networks.
- Experience building custom or embedded Linux distributions with Buildroot, Yocto, and operating immutable or image-based systems using RAUC, bootc, OSTree.
- Experience with UEFI Secure Boot, TPMs, measured boot, hardware-backed identity, or remote attestation.
- Experience packaging and operating virtual network appliances on VMware, KVM, or deploying in AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
- Experience with high-availability networking, dynamic routing, multi-WAN failover, traffic steering or shaping, application identification, or local policy enforcement.
- Experience with Kubernetes or serverless control planes, event-driven systems, and observability platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana, ClickHouse, or OpenTelemetry.
- Experience designing automated fleet tests, hardware-in-the-loop or network-in-the-loop test environments, safe staged rollouts, and remote diagnostic tooling.
Compensation
For Colorado based hires: Estimated annual salary of $168,000 - $231,000 USD.
For Washington based hires: Estimated annual salary of $185,000- $254,000 USD.
This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan.
CloudflareAtlanta, GA
