Senior Software Engineer, Deploy at Scale

Cloudflare; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health Insurance

Dental Insurance

Vision Insurance

401(k) Retirement Savings Plan

Employee Stock Participation Plan

Flexible PTO

Parental Leave

Job summary

Cloudflare is seeking a Senior Software Engineer in the Deploy@Scale team in Austin to lead the platform powering safe, reliable, and automated deployments at scale. This senior IC role sets technical direction across multiple work streams and influences many engineering teams.

You’ll mentor teammates, review designs, and drive architecture decisions that will hold up for years, shaping a platform that enables fast, safe changes across Cloudflare’s global network.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of hands-on software engineering experience owning architecture of distributed, production systems.
• Demonstrated technical leadership beyond your own code: driving RFCs and design reviews.
• Judgment for ambiguity; define problems and roadmaps, not only solutions.
• Experience with safety, observability, and automation in production systems.
• Ability to influence technical direction across teams without direct authority.
• Comfort using AI-assisted development and evaluating its outputs in safety-critical systems.
• Experience with workflow orchestration and large-scale distributed systems.
• Strong written and verbal communication to persuade and align through docs and RFCs.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership for the platform powering automated deployments across Cloudflare.
• Set technical direction across multiple work streams and operate with significant autonomy.
• Lead RFCs, design reviews, and incident retrospectives touching deployment safety.
• Review designs, pair on hard problems, and raise the technical bar through mentorship.
• Define platform scope, tradeoffs, and long-term architecture to ensure safety and scalability.

Skills

Hands-on software engineering

Architecture ownership

RFCs & design reviews

Safety, observability, automation

Influencing technical direction

AI-assisted development

Workflow orchestration

Large-scale distributed systems

Strong 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 ofCloudflare’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 Cloudflare’s equity plan.

Benefits

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
• Dental 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

Financial Benefits

• Short and Long Term Disability Insurance
• Life & Accident 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 them 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.

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 person’s, 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.

Cloudflare provides reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities. Please tell us if you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job. Examples of reasonable accommodations include, but are not limited to, changing the application process, providing documents in an alternate format, using a sign language interpreter, or using specialized equipment. If you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job, please contact us via e‑mail at [e-mail] or via mail at 101 Townsend St. San Francisco, CA 94107.