Senior Systems Engineer

About Us

At Cloudflare, we are on a mission to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world’s largest networks that powers millions of websites and other Internet properties for customers ranging from individual bloggers to SMBs to Fortune 500 companies. Cloudflare protects and accelerates any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. Internet properties powered by Cloudflare all have web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with every request. As a result, they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. Cloudflare was named to Entrepreneur Magazine’s Top Company Cultures list and ranked among the World’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company.

At Cloudflare, we’re not looking for people who wait for a polished roadmap; we’re looking for the builders who see the cracks in the Internet that everyone else has simply learned to live with. We value candidates who have the instinct to spot a "normalized" problem and the AI-native curiosity to create a solution using the latest tools. Our culture is built on iteration, leveraging AI to ship faster today to make it better tomorrow, while ensuring that every improvement, no matter how small, is shared across the team to lift everyone up. If you’re the type of person who values curiosity over bureaucracy, and that AI is a partner in solving tough problems to keep the Internet moving forward, you’ll fit right in.

Senior Systems Engineer

Available Locations

Austin

Atlanta

Denver

Seattle

About the Role

As a Senior Systems Engineer on the Cloudflare One Appliance team, you will shape and build the Linux-based edge appliance runtime and distributed control plane that connect customer sites to Cloudflare. The Appliance runs as physical hardware, a virtual appliance, and in public cloud environments. It gives customers a Cloudflare-managed way to operate hundreds or thousands of branch sites without building their own platform.

This is a hands-on role for a product-minded engineer who can move between low-level systems, distributed services, and API design, while providing technical leadership for major initiatives.

Our architecture follows a "light branch, heavy cloud" philosophy: put policy and intelligence in Cloudflare's network unless locality is required for correctness, survivability, performance, or user experience. The role requires strong technical judgment about that boundary. You will help us build systems that are secure, observable, resilient during partial failures, and safe to operate across a large fleet carrying customer-critical traffic.

Responsibilities

Build systems end to end: Design and implement capabilities spanning the cloud control plane, Linux appliance runtime, telemetry pipeline, and physical, virtual, and cloud deployment environments.

Build the Linux-based networking platform: Develop and harden the appliance dataplane. Build secure, reliable networking capabilities using technologies such as IPsec, MASQUE, eBPF, and Linux kernel networking primitives while keeping the system small, predictable, and secure.

Engineer reliable fleet control: Build distributed control-plane and state-management systems that safely deliver configuration and commands, tolerate intermittent connectivity and partial failures, converge to known-good state, and support zero-touch operation across large device fleets.

Secure the device lifecycle: Improve hardware-backed identity, attestation, secure boot, immutable operating-system images, credential rotation, and staged over-the-air upgrades with safe rollback and recovery.

Make operability a product feature: Design telemetry, diagnostics, synthetic tests, support bundles, and remote operations that help customers and support teams understand the system without treating the appliance as a black box.

Drive customer-centered product decisions: Work with c