# Systems Engineer, Spectrum

**Company:** [Cloudflare](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/cloudflare)
**Location:** Austin, TX
**Role:** Backend Engineering
**Experience:** 5+ years
**Skills:** Go, Rust, tcp, udp, ip, nat, anycast, ebpf, linux networking, REST APIs, tls termination, proxy protocol, envoy, haproxy, nginx stream
**Posted:** 2026-07-30

> Systems Engineer on Cloudflare's Spectrum team building and evolving the high-scale L4 proxy and non-HTTP traffic platform. Requires strong Go experience, deep L3/L4 networking knowledge, Linux primitives including eBPF, and production operations skills.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Work on the Spectrum edge dataplane (Go): TCP/UDP connection acceptance and forwarding, TLS termination, PROXY protocol, connection accounting, and eBPF integrations
- Work on the Spectrum control plane (Go): application configuration APIs, provisioning, and the systems that push config globally to every edge machine
- Handle cross-dataplane integrations: how Spectrum fits together with Unimog for L4 load balancing, with Magic Transit for IP transit, with Argo Smart Routing for accelerated origin paths, etc.
- Drive operational excellence: analytics pipelines, observability, on-call, incident response, and paying down technical debt in a product with a long production history
- Contribute to roadmap evolution: help shape where Spectrum goes next as the L4 counterpart to our HTTP proxy stack
- Partner closely with the rest of Packet Processing, other Traffic Management teams, DDoS, DNS, Core SRE, and Edge SRE to solve problems that span the entire Cloudflare stack

## Requirements
- Experience building and shipping large-scale, reliable, highly distributed systems
- Strong programming experience in Go; familiarity with or willingness to work in Rust is a plus
- Solid understanding of L3 and L4 networking: TCP, UDP, IP, connection state, NAT, anycast, and packet flows
- Experience with Linux networking primitives — sockets, eBPF, network namespaces, netfilter/nftables, tc
- Experience designing and integrating RESTful APIs and backend systems
- Comfort with operating what you build in production — on-call rotations, incident response, and root-cause analysis
- Ability to reason about existing systems at scale: reading unfamiliar code, understanding hidden dependencies, and safely evolving software that has been in production for years
- Excellent debugging and optimization skills, particularly around performance and connection lifecycle issues
- Focus on clarity in written and verbal communication; ability to work across teams to land shared solutions

## Nice-to-Haves
- Experience with TLS termination, PROXY protocol, or L4/L7 proxies (Envoy, HAProxy, nginx stream, etc.)
- Experience with ClickHouse, Kafka, or large-scale connection/flow analytics pipelines
- Experience with globally-distributed KV or config-push systems
- Prior work on DDoS mitigation, anycast routing, L4 load balancing, or high-throughput edge network daemons
- Contributions to open-source networking or proxy projects

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