Senior Software Engineer, Deploy at Scale

Cloudflare; Deutschland; On-site; EUR 155,000 - 224,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Job summary

Cloudflare in Austin, TX is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for the Deploy@Scale team to provide technical leadership across the platform that powers safe, automated deployments at scale. This senior IC role requires shaping architecture, setting direction across multiple work streams, and mentoring engineers without people-management duties.

You will partner with engineering leadership to influence RFCs, drive long-term reliability, and promote AI-assisted development while maintaining

Qualifications

• 8+ years of hands-on software engineering experience.
• Technical leadership beyond your own code: RFCs and design reviews.
• Judgment for ambiguity - defining problem and roadmap when requirements are unclear.
• Deep experience with safety, observability, and automation in production systems.
• Influencing technical direction across teams without direct authority.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership across multiple work streams and set platform direction.
• Review designs, mentor teammates, and elevate the technical bar.
• Shape multi-quarter roadmap and participate in RFCs and incident retrospectives.
• Ensure deployments are safe, reliable, and scalable over years.

Skills

Software engineering

Technical leadership

RFC design reviews

Ambiguity judgment

Observability & safety

Platform APIs

AI-assisted development

Distributed systems

Communication

Job description

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.

Location: Austin, TX (US)

Cloudflare's Infrastructure Team builds and runs the systems and software that support our solutions that handle trillions of requests per month. We ensure that all of the new and existing features and functionality that Cloudflare offers can be managed at scale and meet the needs of our massively growing, global customer base.

About the role

As a Senior Software Engineer in the Deploy@Scale team, you will provide technical leadership for the platform that powers safe, reliable, and automated deployments across Cloudflare. This is a senior IC role: you will set technical direction across multiple work streams, not just execute within one. You'll be expected to operate with significant autonomy - identifying the right problems to solve, driving architecture decisions that will hold up over multiple years, and influencing how dozens of engineering teams across Cloudflare think about safe change. You will partner directly with your EM and leadership to shape the multi-quarter roadmap, and you'll be a primary technical voice in cross-team design reviews, RFCs, and incident retrospectives that touch deployment safety. You'll spend meaningful time unblocking and elevating the rest of the team: reviewing designs before they become code, pairing on the hardest problems, and raising the technical bar through mentorship - without needing to be a people manager to do it. You'll be defining what the platform is, deciding what not to build, and making the tradeoffs which ensure the system is safe, fast, and scalable five years from now.

Where we're heading

From human-in-the-loop to machine-in-the-loop: fully automated, health-mediated deployments as the default, at hundreds of thousands of releases a day. Consolidating a fragmented landscape: unifying release orchestration, health mediation, feature flagging, and configuration rollback into one coherent platform. AI as a first-class part of the platform : you'll help define where and how AI assists both the platform and the humans operating it.

This is a unique opportunity to work on complex, globally distributed systems that underpin every Cloudflare product. You will play a key role in advancing the infrastructure that enables fast, safe delivery of changes to production, directly impacting the reliability and velocity of Cloudflare's global network. You will collaborate with the team to understand business needs and develop technical solutions, working closely with internal customers to turn their workflows into platform capabilities. You will thrive in a fast-paced iterative engineering environment with short release cycles. This role may require flexibility to be on-call outside of standard working hours to address technical issues as needed.

Examples of desirable skills, knowledge, and experience

• 8+ years of hands-on software engineering experience, including a track record of owning the architecture of complex, distributed, production-critical systems end to end.
• Demonstrated technical leadership beyond your own code: driving RFCs and design reviews that other senior engineers and teams rely on, and being sought out as a technical escalation point.
• Judgment for ambiguity - comfortable defining the problem and the roadmap, not just the solution, in an environment where requirements are not fully specified upfront.
• Deep experience with safety, observability, and automation in production systems: designing rollback paths, health signals, and guardrails that other systems and teams build on top of.
• Experience influencing technical direction across team boundaries - through architecture, mentorship, or platform APIs/contracts - without direct authority.
• Comfort operating in a fast-moving environment with AI as a working tool: fluent use of AI-assisted development, critical evaluation of its output, and a point of view on where it should and shouldn't be trusted in a safety-critical system.
• Experience with workflow orchestration, long-running/durable execution, or large-scale distributed systems is a strong plus.
• Strong written and verbal communication - this role requires writing docs and RFCs that persuade and align, not just describe.

Bonus points

• Prior experience owning a deployment, progressive delivery, or change-management platform at scale.
• Experience leading a technical migration across many independent teams (e.g., a platform sunset/replacement).

Equity

This role is eligible to participate in Cloudfla