Principal Systems Engineer

Available Locations: Austin Atlanta Denver Seattle Washington D.C

About the role

Were seeking an exceptional Principal Engineer to join our newly formed Product Platform Task Forcea high-impact team that tackles critical infrastructure initiatives spanning our entire product suite and Cloudflares massive edge network.

What youll do

Youll partner with engineering leadership to identify architect and drive execution on complex technical projects that transcend individual team boundaries from organization-wide authentication and authorization systems to ultra-distributed architectures that leverage Cloudflares global edge infrastructure performance optimizations and shared services that enable multiple products. This role is perfect for a seasoned technical leader who excels at solving ambiguous high-stakes problems with broad organizational impact mentoring senior engineers and establishing technical direction that influences the entire engineering organization. Youll have significant autonomy to shape our technical strategy while working collaboratively across product teams platform engineers and executive leadership to ensure our infrastructure scales efficiently and our engineering culture thrives.

Responsibilities

• Define technical strategy and lead execution of high-impact cross-cutting initiatives that benefit the entire engineering organization such as service-to-service authentication systems RBAC/authorization frameworks ultra-distributed architectures leveraging Cloudflares edge network API layer improvements observability infrastructure and shared services that span our product portfolio.
• Architect and implement security-critical systems including authentication authorization and access control mechanisms that work seamlessly across our distributed infrastructure ensuring both robust security postures and excellent developer experiences for teams building on these platforms.
• Design and build ultra-distributed systems that take full advantage of Cloudflares massive global edge network including edge computing with Workers and Durable Objects ensuring our services deliver exceptional performance and reliability to users worldwide while managing the complexity of geo-distributed state and coordination.
• Set architectural standards and technical direction for our Product Platform stackincluding Go services Python pipelines TypeScript edge computing (Cloudflare Workers/Durable Objects) and PostgreSQL data layerensuring decisions balance immediate business needs with long-term scalability maintainability and engineering velocity.
• Identify critical technical debt systemic inefficiencies and infrastructure gaps across the organization building business cases and driving consensus among leadership to fund and execute solutions that might otherwise fall through the cracks of product-focused roadmaps.
• Serve as a technical force multiplier by embedding with tiger teams or product groups that need deep infrastructure expertise providing architectural leadership hands-on implementation where needed and ensuring projects ship with production-grade reliability security and performance.
• Mentor and elevate senior engineers across the organization through code reviews architectural discussions and technical design reviews establishing patterns and practices for distributed systems security and edge computing that raise the bar for engineering excellence throughout the company.

Desirable Skills Knowledge and Experience:

• 10 years of software engineering experience with a demonstrated history of leading complex organization-wide technical initiatives that delivered measurable improvements to system performance reliability security developer productivity or engineering culture.
• Deep expertise in building distributed systems and production infrastructure at scale with proficiency in Go and strong working knowledge of Python/TypeScript; proven ability to make sound architectural decisions for systems that span multiple data centers regions or edge locations.
• Strong understanding of authentication authorization and security fundamentals including experience designing and implementing service-to-service authentication systems RBAC/permission models identity management or similar security-critical infrastructure.
• Extensive experience with PostgreSQL or similar relational databases at scale including advanced optimization techniques replication strategies and understanding the tradeoffs of distributed data storage and consistency models.
• Strong track record of technical leadership and influence without direct authority including driving consensus on technical decisions across multiple teams mentoring senior engineers and establishing architectural patterns that are widely adopted across an organization.
• Exceptional ability to navigate ambiguous problem spaces identify the highest-impact technical work and drive projects autonomously from conception through adoptionbalancing pragmatic execution with long-term technical excellence.
• Please be prepared to discuss specific examples of organization-wide technical initiatives youve led particularly distributed systems or security infrastructure their measurable business impact and how you influenced technical direction across multiple teams.

Nice to Have Skills

• Deep experience with Cloudflares developer platform particularly Cloudflare Workers Durable Objects and architecting ultra-distributed applications for edge computing environments at global scale.
• Previous experience as a Principal Engineer Staff engineer or technical leader on platform infrastructure or task force teams that operate outside traditional product roadmaps with a focus on enabling engineering organizations.
• Proven expertise in building developer platforms service mesh architectures zero-trust security systems API gateways or other foundational distributed infrastructure that significantly improved engineering velocity or operational excellence.
• Experience architecting and operating billing systems usage metering or other high-stakes platform components that require exceptional reliability accuracy and work correctly in distributed eventually-consistent environments.
• Public evidence of technical leadership such as conference talks on distributed systems or security widely-read technical blog posts significant open source contributions or published architectural patterns that have been adopted by the broader engineering community.

Compensation

Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.

• For New York City Washington Washington D.C. and California (excluding Bay Area) based hires: Estimated annual salary of $230000 - $281000

Equity

This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflares equity plan.

Benefits

Cloudflare offers a complete package of benefits and programs to support you and your family. Our benefits programs can help you pay health care expenses support caregiving build capital for the future and make life a little easier and fun! The below is a description of our benefits for employees in the United States and benefits may vary for employees based outside the U.S.

Health & Welfare Benefits

• Medical/Rx Insurance
• Dental Insurance
• Vision Insurance
• Flexible Spending Accounts
• Commuter Spending Accounts
• Fertility & Family Forming Benefits
• On-demand mental health support and Employee Assistance Program
• Global Travel Medical Insurance

Financial Benefits

• Short and Long Term Disability Insurance
• Life & Accident Insurance
• 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan
• Employee Stock Participation Plan

Time Off

• Flexible paid time off covering vacation and sick leave
• Leave programs including parental pregnancy health medical and bereavement leave

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.

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