Senior Systems Engineer, Identity & Access Management

Worky; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Cloudflare is hiring a hands-on senior engineer for the IAM team to own end-to-end surfaces in authentication and authorization. You will design high-throughput systems, craft secure REST APIs, and drive reliability under production load.

You’ll collaborate with Product, Security, and UX to ship robust capabilities and leverage AI tools where appropriate. The role emphasizes ownership, security, and cross-team impact across a globally scaled platform, with opportunities to work on edge-capable

Qualifications

• 5-8 years building and operating production systems at scale.
• Knowledge of identity protocols or fine-grained authorization systems (RBAC/ABAC).
• Proficiency in Go and TypeScript across the stack.
• Experience designing REST APIs with authentication and versioning.
• PostgreSQL and Redis: schema, queries, caching and consistency tradeoffs.
• Distributed systems intuition and global state considerations.
• Strong ownership, security mindset, and cross-team collaboration.

Responsibilities

• Feature development: high-throughput IAM capabilities for APIs.
• System evolution: modern, distributed authentication/authorization architectures.
• API and system design: translate security requirements into robust APIs.
• Engineering excellence: code reviews and technical design docs.
• Operational stewardship: ensure reliability under load with observability.
• AI-assisted development: use AI tools responsibly across workflow.

Skills

5-8 yrs exp

Identity protocols

Go

TypeScript

API design

PostgreSQL

Redis

Distributed systems

Security awareness

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Terraform

Prometheus

Grafana

Kibana

Job description

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.

About the Role

Cloudflare runs one of the world's largest networks, and every API call that configures it, from any customer, integration, or internal service, starts by proving who is calling and what they're allowed to do. The IAM team owns the authentication and authorization systems behind that: the identity layer of the Control Plane operating at global scale. Our surface spans things like login and SSO, OAuth and API tokens, account membership, roles and permissions, and SCIM provisioning.

We're hiring a hands-on senior engineer to work on correctness-critical, high-throughput, highly resilient services. You'll own surfaces end-to-end, chase down hard problems with high agency, and improve systems while they're serving production traffic.

Responsibilities

• Feature development: design and build high-throughput, low-latency IAM capabilities that power both customer-facing and internal service APIs.

• System evolution: contribute to the design and evolution of our authentication and authorization systems into modern, distributed, and edge-capable architectures.

• API and system design: translate product and security requirements into robust, well-structured APIs and technical specifications in collaboration with Product, Security, and UX teams.

• Engineering excellence: maintain a high bar through thorough code reviews, technical design documents, and collaborative problem-solving.

• Operational stewardship: own the reliability of the platform under constant load, ensuring observability and resilience are built into every service.

• AI-assisted development: use AI tools throughout your workflow, from code generation to debugging, and bring the judgment to know when to trust them.

Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience

These are examples of what a strong candidate brings:

• Professional Experience: 5-8 years building and operating production systems at scale.

• Identity Domain Knowledge: Working knowledge of identity protocols and models (OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML, SCIM, RBAC/ABAC, and session management, etc.). Hands-on experience implementing identity protocols or fine-grained authorization systems, RBAC, ABAC, relationship-based access control, or policy engines (such as Cedar), in production.

• Language Proficiency: Proficiency in languages like Go and Typescript and comfort working across Cloudflare’s tech stack.

• API Design: Experience designing and building REST APIs: routing, authentication, request lifecycle, and versioning.

• Database & Storage: PostgreSQL and Redis experience: schema design, query optimization, caching strategies, and consistency tradeoffs.

• Distributed Systems: Strong distributed systems intuition: consistency models, event-driven replication, and the implications of global state propagation.

• High Agency: High standards for correctness and security; curious, self-directed, and comfortable driving ambiguous problems to resolution across team boundaries.

Bonus Points

• Experience with credential and token lifecycle systems: issuance, rotation, scoping, revocation, or service-to-service authentication at scale.

• Familiarity with the Cloudflare developer platform: Workers, Durable Objects, KV, R2, etc.

• Experience incrementally re-architecting a large, long-lived codebase under production traffic, and familiarity with containerized deployment (Docker, Kubernetes), infrastructure as code (Terraform), and observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, Kibana).

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.

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.