Senior Systems Engineer - Edge & Network Control Plane

Cloudflare

Seattle (WA)

On-site

USD 185,000 - 254,000

Full time

14 days+

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Benefits offered by this job

Medical Insurance

Dental Insurance

Vision Insurance

401(k) Retirement Savings Plan

Employee Stock Participation Plan

Job summary

Cloudflare seeks a Senior Systems Engineer for its edge runtime and distributed control plane, shaping the Linux-based appliance and cloud integration. You will work across low-level systems, distributed services, and API design while providing technical leadership for major initiatives.

The role follows a light-branch, heavy-cloud philosophy and emphasizes secure, observable systems across a large fleet. Responsibilities include building end-to-end systems, hardening the appliance dataplane,

Qualifications

8+ years of professional software engineering experience building complex production systems.
Strong software engineering skills in Rust, C/C++, Go, or a comparable system programming language, with the ability to work across the stack, including TypeScript.
Strong understanding of Linux networking internals, with experience building against the kernel networking stack using eBPF/XDP, netlink, and network namespaces.
Experience designing and implementing distributed control planes, desired-state reconciliation, remote configuration, or similar systems that manage large, intermittently connected fleets.
Experience designing secure systems, including threat modeling, least privilege, credential handling, and software supply-chain integrity.
A track record of owning ambiguous initiatives from discovery through production, including architecture, implementation, staged deployment, incident response, and failure analysis.
Technical leadership and communication skills that let you influence decisions, explain system trade-offs to different audiences, and bring stakeholders toward a clear outcome.
Product judgment grounded in customer evidence, usability, and operational simplicity.
Practical experience using AI-assisted engineering tools, coding agents, harnesses, or automation responsibly to improve engineering quality and throughput.

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 a Linux-based networking platform: Develop and harden the appliance dataplane. Build secure, reliable networking capabilities using technologies such as IPsec, MASQUE, eBPF, and Linux kernel networking primitives while keeping the system small, predictable, and secure.
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-the-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.