Software Engineer, Network Firewall

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.

Available Locations: Austin, Atlanta

Software Engineer, Network Firewall

Role Summary

As a Software Engineer on our team, you will work across a wide range of technologies and systems to deliver new features, improve performance, and increase the scalability of our Network Services products. You will help evolve our Network Firewall and related security capabilities across both north-south and east-west network architectures, with demanding throughput and latency requirements. You’ll build, deploy, and operate your team’s systems on top of one of the largest edge networks in the world. You’ll partner with some of the best engineers and product managers to solve big problems that have a meaningful impact in the lives of our customers and users.

Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience

Experience building and shipping large-scale, reliable, highly distributed systems

Systems-level programming experience; experience with Go and/or Rust is valuable

Expertise in L3 and L4 networking protocols; L2 experience is also valuable

Experience building high-performance network security products such as network firewalls, IDS/IPS, DDoS mitigation, rate limiting, packet capture, or threat intelligence integrations

Experience with low-latency userspace packet processing; familiarity with Linux kernel networking primitives such as netfilter, nftables, eBPF, tc, and network namespaces is also valuable

Experience designing and integrating RESTful APIs and backend systems

Experience with large-scale distributed data pipelines, from data structuring to efficient querying to data analysis

Excellent debugging, profiling, and performance optimization skills for high-throughput, latency-sensitive systems

Bonus Points

Attention to detail and ability to solve complex customer problems

Own solutions end-to-end and driving the design, development, and deployment process

Able to work across teams and level common, sustainable solutions

Creative, open-minded, collaborative problem solver

Focus on clarity in written and verbal communication

What Makes Cloudflare Special?

We’re not just a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company. We’re 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.

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