Senior Systems Engineer - Edge & Cloud Networking Leader

Webhosting; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 185,000 - 254,000; Full time

Job summary

Cloudflare seeks a Senior Systems Engineer for the Cloudflare One Appliance team to design and build the Linux-based edge appliance runtime and distributed control plane that connect customer sites to Cloudflare. The Appliance runs in physical hardware, a virtual appliance, and public cloud environments, enabling customers to operate hundreds or thousands of branch sites with Cloudflare‑managed control.

This hands-on role spans low-level systems, distributed services, and API design, with

Responsibilities

• Build systems end to end: Design and implement capabilities spanning the cloud control plane, Linux appliance runtime, telemetry pipeline, and physical, virtual, and cloud deployment environments.
• Build the Linux-based networking platform: Develop and harden the appliance dataplane. Build secure, reliable networking capabilities using IPsec, MASQUE, eBPF, and Linux kernel networking primitives.
• Engineer reliable fleet control: Build distributed control-plane and state-management systems that safely deliver configuration and commands, tolerate intermittent connectivity and partial failures, converge to known-good state, and support zero-touch operation across large device fleets.
• Secure the device lifecycle: Improve hardware-backed identity, attestation, secure boot, immutable operating-system images, credential rotation, and staged over-air upgrades with safe rollback and recovery.
• Make operability a product feature: Design telemetry, diagnostics, synthetic tests, support bundles, and remote operations that help customers and support teams understand the system without treating the appliance as a black box.
• Drive customer-centered product decisions: Work with customers, Product, Support, and Solutions Engineering to understand customer requirements and turn them into pragmatic technical direction. Bring clear opinions, and revise them when customer feedback or production evidence points to a better answer.
• Own production outcomes: Prototype quickly, ship in safe increments, and own rollout, monitoring, incident follow-up, and long-term maintainability.
• Lead across teams: Set architectural direction for major initiatives, write clear technical proposals, conduct rigorous reviews, and mentor other engineers. Build executable plans with Cloudflare WAN, Gateway, DEX, the Cloudflare One Client, and platform and security teams.

Job description

Cloudflare seeks a Senior Systems Engineer for the Cloudflare One Appliance team to design and build the Linux-based edge appliance runtime and distributed control plane that connect customer sites to Cloudflare. The Appliance runs in physical hardware, a virtual appliance, and public cloud environments, enabling customers to operate hundreds or thousands of branch sites with Cloudflare‑managed control.

This hands-on role spans low-level systems, distributed services, and API design, with