Principal Software Engineer, Workers Deploy & Config

CloudFlare; Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 220,000 - 303,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Vision insurance

401(k) Retirement Savings Plan

Employee Stock Participation Plan

Flexible paid time off

Job summary

Cloudflare is seeking a Principal Software Engineer for the Workers Deploy & Config team in an in-office role. You will lead the architectural evolution of the control plane and build large-scale systems to deploy, configure, and manage Workers globally, serving millions of users across Cloudflare’s developer platform.

You will mentor engineers, own core services, and drive reliability, performance, and developer experience at global scale, with opportunities to advance AI-powered workflows

Qualifications

• Experience with large-scale distributed systems in live environments.
• Proven ability to own architecture across multiple teams.
• Strong experience designing RESTful APIs for developers.
• Experience with AI-assisted development and responsible workflows.
• Go production experience is required.

Responsibilities

• Lead the architectural evolution of the Workers control plane.
• Identify high-leverage technical challenges and set engineering paths.
• Re-engineer core services to handle traffic growth.
• Own stability and efficiency of a core customer-facing system.
• Collaborate with Product and engineering leadership to shape roadmaps.
• Mentor mid-level and senior engineers.
• Participate in on-call to maintain global platform availability.
• Define benchmarks for API responsiveness, availability, and reliability.

Skills

Go in production

Kubernetes

Prometheus

Grafana

RESTful APIs

Distributed systems

Architectural leadership

On-call support

AI in development

Mentoring engineers

Tools

Cloudflare Workers

Pages

React

Job description

Principal Software Engineer, Workers Deploy & Config

In-Office

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.

Position Location: Austin, TX | New York City, NY | Washington, DC

About the Role

Join the Workers Deploy & Config team as a Principal Engineer, the most senior technical role on the team behind Cloudflare’s serverless edge developer platform. You’ll build the critical large-scale systems that let developers deploy, configure, and manage Workers globally, powering everything from simple static sites to full-stack applications serving millions of users. This team sits at the foundation of Cloudflare’s developer platform, including Pages and R2. The work spans distributed systems, high-traffic APIs, performance, reliability, and developer experience at global scale.

Responsibilities

• Lead the architectural evolution of the Workers control plane and help define its multi-year strategy.
• Identify high-leverage technical challenges and turn ambiguous problems into actionable engineering paths.
• Re-engineer core services to keep ahead of exponential traffic growth.
• Architect foundational primitives that unlock new product capabilities and categories.
• Own the stability and efficiency of a core customer-facing system.
• Establish rigorous benchmarks for API responsiveness, availability, and reliability.
• Participate in on-call to help maintain global platform availability.
• Collaborate with Product and engineering leadership to shape future roadmaps.
• Serve as the primary technical representative for Workers Deploy & Config in major design forums.
• Mentor mid-level and senior engineers and raise overall engineering standards.
• Investigate and apply emerging technologies to improve the developer platform.
• Deep experience using Go in production environments.
• Experience with Kubernetes and metrics/observability tooling such as Prometheus and Grafana, or similar.
• Proven history of architecting, expanding, and managing massive distributed infrastructures in live environments.
• Track record of owning architecture across multiple teams or systems from concept through global release.
• Demonstrated organizational influence through standards-setting, design leadership, cross-team collaboration, and mentoring senior engineers.
• Strong ability to design and evolve RESTful APIs with a focus on developer experience.
• Track record of increasing team leverage with AI, including evaluating and introducing AI-assisted development and agentic workflows responsibly.

Bonus Points

• Experience with C++ or Rust.
• Experience working on a control plane or data plane.
• Experience using Cloudflare Workers or Pages.
• Experience working in frontend frameworks such as React.
• Experience managing interns or mentoring junior engineers.
• Product mindset and comfort talking to customers and partners.
• Familiarity with GraphQL
• Familiarity with RPC

Compensation

Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.

• For New York City, New Jersey, Washington, Washington DC, and California (excluding Bay Area) based hires: Estimated annual salary of $220,000 - $303,000

Equity

This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan.

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
• 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
• Short and Long Term Disability 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

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.

Project Galileo : Since 2014, we've equipped more than 2,400 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 Cloudflare’s 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, we've 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. Here’s the deal - we don’t 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 you’d like to be a part of? We’d 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.

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