Software Engineer, Application Performance

Software Engineer All Levels
(Hybrid)

Hiring Process & Cloudflares Application Performance Engineering Teams

If you are obsessed with making the Internet faster safer and more reliable for everyone but are unsure about which team to apply for this role will give you the best opportunity to match with a Software Engineering team that is most aligned to your experience skill and ambition. Weve created a hiring process designed to find top tier candidates passionate about improving web and software application performance and help them find the best team fit for them at Cloudflare. At the end of the hiring process you will have the opportunity to meet with one or more teams to find out if they are the best team match but if you discover during the interview process that a particular team is the most interesting to you let us know.

About Engineering at Cloudflare

Cloudflares Engineers build and operate the software that helps power 25 million Internet properties and millions of businesses around the world. Across our engineering organizations we have opportunities for high caliber curious and empathetic technology enthusiasts to take on big challenges and build some of the best skills in the industry. Were looking for talented team members to help build and quickly iterate on high-growth products scale our expanding network build tools to improve availability performance uptime and response times and make systems fault-tolerant and elastic.

Cloudflares network is a massively distributed system spanning more than 300 cities in over 125 countries including 35 cities in Mainland China and interconnects with approximately 13000 networks globally with a mission to make the Internet better safer and more powerful every day. As a Software Engineer at Cloudflare youll work on the code that runs close to the end user at Internet scale.

Examples of software systems at Cloudflare:

• A TLS/HTTP proxy to make the connection from eyeball to edge as fast and secure as possible
• Content optimization that takes content served from customer sites and makes it more performant
• A reverse-proxy system that caches customer website content according to customer configuration
• Optimization of connections from Cloudflare to our customers origin servers to reduce their load and increase performance
• Data Science diving deep into HTTP request data identifying malicious and fraudulent traffic patterns and building novel solutions for mitigating such attacks.
• One of the biggest data pipelines in the world operating at well over 250M events per second
• Open source projects including Pingora Trie-hard and more to come..

Requirements for this role

• First and foremost curiosity and critical thinking
• Experience (and love for) debugging complex distributed systems
• Experience with a continuous integration workflow and using source control (we use git)
• Experience with build and maintain distributed systems
• Understanding of what it takes to build secure systems
• Ability to work in multiple systems level programming languages - bonus points for Go and/or Rust
• Experience with monitoring alerting and debugging high volume production systems

Examples of desirable skills knowledge and experience

• Minimum 4 years professional experience as a developer/engineer
• Solid grasp of how TCP/QUIC and HTTP work
• Experience with Linux networking
• Understanding systems at the network protocol level including the differences between what the specs say and what actually happens on the Internet
• Strong systems level programming skills
• Experience with databases similar to PostgreSQL and Clickhouse
• Good Unix knowledge having submitted patches to Operating Systems a huge plus for some roles
• Fluent in analyses of large data sets
• BA/BS or higher in Computer Science/Engineering or equivalent professional experience

What Makes Cloudflare Special

Were not just a highly ambitious large-scale technology company. Were a highly ambitious large-scale technology company with a soul. Fundamental to our mission to help build a better Internet is protecting the free and open Internet.

Project Galileo: Since 2014 weve equipped more than 2400 journalism and civil society organizations in 111 countries with powerful tools to defend themselves against attacks that would otherwise censor their work technology already used by Cloudflares enterprise customers--at no cost.

Athenian Project: In 2017 we created the Athenian Project to ensure that state and local governments have the highest level of protection and reliability for free so that their constituents have access to election information and voter registration. Since the project weve provided services to more than 425 local government election websites in 33 states.

1.1.1.1: We released 1.1.1.1 to help fix the foundation of the Internet by building a faster more secure and privacy-centric public DNS resolver. This is available publicly for everyone to use - it is the first consumer-focused service Cloudflare has ever released. Heres the deal - we dont store client IP addresses never ever. We will continue to abide by our privacy commitment and ensure that no user data is sold to advertisers or used to target consumers.

Sound like something youd like to be a part of Wed love to hear from you!

This position may require access to information protected under U.S. export control laws including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations. Please note that any offer of employment may be conditioned on your authorization to receive software or technology controlled under these U.S. export laws without sponsorship for an export license.

Cloudflare is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunity for all people and place great value in both diversity and inclusiveness. All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to their or any other persons perceived or actual race color religion sex gender gender identity gender expression sexual orientation national origin ancestry citizenship age physical or mental disability medical condition family care status or any other basis protected by law. We are an AA/Veterans/Disabled Employer.

Cloudflare provides reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities. Please tell us if you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job. Examples of reasonable accommodations include but are not limited to changing the application process providing documents in an alternate format using a sign language interpreter or using specialized equipment. If you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job please contact us via e-mail at or via mail at 101 Townsend St. San Francisco CA 94107.