Senior Software Engineer, Distributed Systems

Cloudflare; United States; On-site; USD 80,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Join a forward-thinking company on a mission to enhance the Internet. As a Distributed Systems Engineer, you'll develop and optimize software that powers over 25 million Internet properties globally. This role offers the chance to work on cutting-edge technology in a collaborative environment where your contributions will have a significant impact. The team values curiosity, empathy, and continuous learning, providing a supportive atmosphere for personal and professional growth. Be part of an innovative firm that is dedicated to building a better, safer Internet for everyone.

Benefits

Medical/Rx Insurance

Dental Insurance

Vision Insurance

Flexible Spending Accounts

Commuter Spending Accounts

On-demand mental health support

401(k) Retirement Savings Plan

Employee Stock Participation Plan

Flexible paid time off

Leave programs

Qualifications

• Experience with debugging to ensure system reliability.
• Strong programming skills and understanding of protocols.
• Desire to learn and share knowledge with others.

Responsibilities

• Build robust, secure, and high-performance distributed systems.
• Optimize solutions for performance and reliability.
• Work on software that powers millions of Internet properties.

Skills

Understanding at the protocol level

Confidence in multiple programming languages

Debugging skills

Strong systems level programming skills

Optimizing complex solutions

Continuous integration workflow

Unix knowledge

Understanding of security issues

Monitoring and debugging production systems

Designing and building APIs

Communication skills

Desire to learn and improve

Mentoring

Tools

Git

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.

We realize people do not fit into neat boxes. We are looking for curious and empathetic individuals who are committed to developing themselves and learning new skills, and we are ready to help you do that. We cannot complete our mission without building a diverse and inclusive team. We hire the best people based on an evaluation of their potential and support them throughout their time at Cloudflare. Come join us!

Hiring will be focused on those residing within the greater Austin, TX metro area. It will be a hybrid role, with the expectation of 2 days per week in the office.

About the Role

Cloudflare’s Engineers build and operate the software that helps power 25+ million Internet properties and millions of businesses around the world. Across our engineering organizations, we have opportunities for high caliber, curious and empathetic people to take on big challenges and build some of the best skills in the industry. We’re looking for talented team members to help build high-growth products, help scale our expanding network, build tools to improve availability, performance, uptime, and response times, and make systems failure-resistant and ready-to-scale.

Cloudflare is a system spanning the globe, on a mission to make the Internet better, safer, and more powerful every day. As a Distributed Systems Engineer at Cloudflare, you’ll work on the code that runs close to the end user, runs at a massive scale, and is deployed to 250+ cities around the world.

Examples of software systems at Cloudflare include:

• A TLS/HTTP proxy to make the connection from eyeball to edge as fast and secure as possible
• Filtering malicious traffic and handling good traffic according to customer configuration
• Content optimization that takes content served from customer sites and makes it more performant
• A platform that runs “serverless” Workers and provides a key value store
• A reverse-proxy system that caches customer website content according to customer configuration
• Optimization of connections from Cloudflare to our customers' origin servers to reduce their load and increase performance
• Our Authoritative DNS server and our public resolver 1.1.1.1.
• One of the biggest data pipelines in the world, operating at well over 25M events per second

We operate some of the fastest, and most widely distributed services on the Internet. Your work will focus on building robust, secure, and high performance distributed systems. We are a small engineering team operating at a massive scale, so what you do will have a huge impact.

Examples of desirable skills, knowledge and experience

• Understanding at the protocol level, including the differences between what the specs say, and what actually happens on the Internet
• Confidence to work in multiple programming languages - bonus points for Go and/or Rust experience
• Experience (and love) for debugging to ensure the system works in all cases
• Strong systems level programming skills
• Excited by the idea of optimizing complex solutions to general problems
• Experience with a continuous integration workflow and using source control (we use git)
• Good Unix knowledge, patches to Operating Systems a huge plus for some roles
• Understanding of security issues and responsibilities
• Experience with monitoring, alerting and debugging high volume production systems
• Fluent in analyses of data sets such as logs
• Designing and building APIs
• Great oral and written communications skills
• Desire to learn and improve
• Willing and eager to share knowledge, and mentor

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

This role may require flexibility to be on-call outside of standard working hours to address technical issues as needed.

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!

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.