Senior Systems Engineer, Identity & Access Management

Cloudflare runs one of the worlds largest networks and every API call that configures it from any customer integration or internal service starts by proving who is calling and what theyre allowed to do. The IAM team owns the authentication and authorization systems behind that: the identity layer of the Control Plane operating at global scale. Our surface spans things like login and SSO OAuth and API tokens account membership roles and permissions and SCIM provisioning.

Were hiring a hands-on senior engineer to work on correctness-critical high-throughput highly resilient services. Youll own surfaces end-to-end chase down hard problems with high agency and improve systems while theyre serving production traffic.

• Feature development: design and build high-throughput low-latency IAM capabilities that power both customer-facing and internal service APIs.

• System evolution: contribute to the design and evolution of our authentication and authorization systems into modern distributed and edge-capable architectures.

• API and system design: translate product and security requirements into robust well-structured APIs and technical specifications in collaboration with Product Security and UX teams.

• Engineering excellence: maintain a high bar through thorough code reviews technical design documents and collaborative problem-solving.

• Operational stewardship: own the reliability of the platform under constant load ensuring observability and resilience are built into every service.

• AI-assisted development: use AI tools throughout your workflow from code generation to debugging and bring the judgment to know when to trust them.

These are examples of what a strong candidate brings:

• Professional Experience: 5-8 years building and operating production systems at scale.

• Identity Domain Knowledge: Working knowledge of identity protocols and models (OAuth 2.0 OIDC SAML SCIM RBAC/ABAC and session management etc.). Hands-on experience implementing identity protocols or fine-grained authorization systems RBAC ABAC relationship-based access control or policy engines (such as Cedar) in production.

• Language Proficiency: Proficiency in languages like Go and Typescript and comfort working across Cloudflares tech stack.

• API Design: Experience designing and building REST APIs: routing authentication request lifecycle and versioning.

• Database & Storage: PostgreSQL and Redis experience: schema design query optimization caching strategies and consistency tradeoffs.

• Distributed Systems: Strong distributed systems intuition: consistency models event-driven replication and the implications of global state propagation.

• High Agency: High standards for correctness and security; curious self-directed and comfortable driving ambiguous problems to resolution across team boundaries.

• Experience with credential and token lifecycle systems: issuance rotation scoping revocation or service-to-service authentication at scale.

• Familiarity with the Cloudflare developer platform: Workers Durable Objects KV R2 etc.

• Experience incrementally re-architecting a large long-lived codebase under production traffic and familiarity with containerized deployment (Docker Kubernetes) infrastructure as code (Terraform) and observability tooling (Prometheus Grafana Kibana).

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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