Engineering Manager, Linux Team

Available Locations: London UK

What Youll Do

• Lead and Mentor: Manage a high-performing team of kernel and systems engineers fostering a culture of collaboration-first and continuous knowledge sharing both internally and with the global open-source community.
• Own the OS Lifecycle: Oversee the end-to-end delivery of the Linux Kernel and core OS components. Your goal is a fully automated continuous delivery pipeline that moves from merge to 100% production in less than 30 days.
• Drive Technical Vision: Steer the Cloudflare kernel development roadmap. You will balance the need for cutting-edge features with the absolute requirements of production stability security and performance.
• Upstream Advocacy: Promote a minimal patch philosophy by ensuring your team is a top contributor to the Linux Kernel. You will support engineers in becoming upstream maintainers for critical subsystems.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Act as a consultant to hardware and service teams helping them onboard new hardware and optimize workloads for our OS. Youll lead a virtual team environment where any engineer at Cloudflare can contribute to the kernel.
• Innovate Debugging: Tackle the impossible challenges of kernel-level debugging. You will lead the development of automated systems that collect critical telemetry when a system crashes even when traditional debuggers cannot run.
• Measure Success: Use DORA metrics and team-specific capabilities - such as the time to fix a kernel issue and upstream commit volume - to track and improve team impact.

What Youll Bring

• Systems Leadership: 5 years of experience managing engineering teams ideally in low-level systems kernel development or large-scale infrastructure environments.
• Low-Level Expertise: A deep understanding of Linux Kernel internals x86/ARM architecture and OS design fundamentals. You should be comfortable discussing memory management schedulers and network stacks.
• Automation Mindset: Experience building or managing CI/CD pipelines for foundational software. You believe that toil is a bug and automation is the feature.
• Open Source Pedigree: A proven track record of engaging with the open-source community. You understand the nuances of upstreaming and how to navigate community dynamics effectively.
• Operational Empathy: An understanding of the unique challenges of a global reboot-limited production environment. You prioritize stability and have experience with pre-production QA and synthetic workload evaluation.
• Strategic Communication: The ability to translate complex kernel-level obstacles into actionable business insights for stakeholders across the company.
• Resilience: You arent intimidated by the impossible. Whether its a non-reproducible race condition or an unwelcoming upstream thread you lead your team through the challenge with a pragmatic solution-oriented mindset.

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.