Principal Engineer Cloudforce One

Available Locations:Austin TX

About the role

Cloudforce One is Cloudflares threat operations and research team responsible for identifying and disrupting cyber threats ranging from sophisticated cyber criminal activity to nation-state sponsored advanced persistent threats (APTs). Cloudforce One works in close partnership with external organizations and internal Cloudflare teams continuously developing operational tradecraft and expanding ever-growing sources of threat intelligence to enable expedited threat hunting and remediation. Members of Cloudforce One are at the helm of leveraging an incredibly vast and varied set of data points that only one of the worlds largest global networks can provide. The team is able to analyze these unique data points at massive scale and efficiency synthesizing findings into actionable threat intelligence to better protect our customers.

Cloudflares Trust & Safety team is the frontline defense against platform abuse phishing malware distribution fraud and content that undermines the safety of the internet. Together these teams form a unified capability: from tracking an adversarys infrastructure to dismantling it at network scale.

What youll do

Cloudflare is a system spanning the globe on a mission to make the internet better safer and more powerful every day. We are looking for a Principal Engineer who is equal parts architect threat analyst and disruptor someone who doesnt just build systems but fundamentally rethinks how we detect analyze and neutralize threats across one of the worlds largest networks.

This is not a role that lives in a single team or a single codebase. You will operate across the full breadth of Cloudflare Products diving into whatever problem is most critical whether thats redesigning a detection pipeline in Kubernetes deploying a new mitigation capability at the edge via Workers building agentic AI workflows that automate analyst tradecraft or architecting a data system that processes trillions of signals per day. You will be the person teams turn to when the problem is ambiguous the architecture is complex and the adversary is sophisticated.

Our ideal candidate has deep technical expertise in distributed systems architecture and an equally deep understanding of how threat actors operate their tactics techniques procedures and infrastructure. You think like an attacker and build like an engineer who has been burned by production incidents at 3 AM. You are energized by hard problems impatient with the status quo and have a track record of shipping solutions that others said couldnt be done.

Responsibilities

• Drive architectural direction and technical strategy across Cloudforce One engineering spanning services that run in Kubernetes on the edge (Workers D1) and across Cloudflares global network.
• Identify and dismantle technical bottlenecks legacy patterns and architectural debt that slow down threat detection and abuse response then replace them with systems that are faster more reliable and more elegant.
• Design and build critical data pipelines and services to collect enrich analyze and expose threat intelligence and abuse signals at massive scale helping identify Tactics Techniques and Procedures (TTPs) and Indicators of Compromise (IOCs).
• Serve as a technical force multiplier across multiple concurrent projects you will context-switch between threat intelligence platforms abuse detection systems legal response tooling and customer-facing security products as priorities demand.
• Bring a threat-informed perspective to engineering decisions: understand how adversaries adapt how detection rules degrade and how to build systems that stay ahead of evolving attack techniques.
• Collaborate with Threat Intelligence researchers Trust & Safety analysts Product Legal and other engineering teams to translate complex security and compliance requirements into scalable production-grade solutions.
• Mentor and elevate the engineering talent around you set the bar for code quality system design operational rigor and security-first thinking across both organizations.
• Develop and champion agentic AI workflows and AI-assisted development practices that accelerate threat hunting detection engineering and abuse investigation.
• Own the operational excellence of the systems you touch including participation in on-call rotations and incident response.

Desirable Skills Knowledge and Experience:

• 15 years of cyber security experience with an emphasis on building systems to present adversarial trends and techniques both as an internal reputational service and a product facing analyst service.
• 10 years of experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production with demonstrated expertise in complex system architecture and design.
• Deep hands-on proficiency in Go and/or TypeScript with production experience deploying services in Kubernetes and on edge computing platforms (e.g. Cloudflare Workers D1/SQLite-at-the-edge).
• Subject matter expertise in threat intelligence adversarial analysis or detection engineering you understand the Cyber Kill Chain know how to track TTPs and can reason about attacker infrastructure at scale.
• Proven ability to work across organizational boundaries and lead technical initiatives that span multiple teams codebases and problem domains simultaneously.
• Experience with AI-assisted development and agentic AI workflows.
• Strong architectural judgment you know when to build when to refactor and when to burn it down and start over.
• Experience designing and operating critical data pipelines (Kafka Temporal or similar) and working with SQL databases (PostgreSQL) and caching layers (Redis) at scale.
• Excellent communication skills you can explain a complex system design to a VP and debug a race condition with a junior engineer in the same afternoon.
• A track record as a disruptor: you have examples of fundamentally improving how a team system or organization operates not just shipping features.

Bonus Points:

• Experience in the Trust & Safety or platform abuse domain phishing detection malware analysis fraud prevention or content moderation at scale.
• Proficiency in writing detection rules using YARA Snort or similar detection languages.
• Experience analyzing adversary TTPs across web-based threat vectors including phishing obfuscation techniques (HTML encoding JavaScript redirects Base64 embedded scripts).
• Familiarity with Rust.
• Experience with Terraform and infrastructure-as-code practices.
• Prior experience building threat intelligence platforms IOC distribution systems or automated mitigation pipelines.
• Experience with React for internal tooling and analyst-facing applications.
• Deep understanding of DNS TLS/SSL HTTP and web security standards.

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

This role may require flexibility to be on-call outside of standard working hours to address technical issues as needed.

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!

Please note that applicants who progress to the offer stage of the interview process may be asked to attend an in-person interview within one of the Cloudflare Offices or Cloudflare Hubs. More details about this will be available at that stage of the interview process.

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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