Hardware Systems Engineer

About the Role

We need to make thoughtful infrastructure choices affecting a significant portion of the Internet. Hardware we work with includes servers and components, as well as PDUs and network hardware.

As a Hardware Systems Engineer, you will work with colleagues on the Hardware Engineering, Product teams, and Hardware Sourcing teams to troubleshoot and maintain Cloudflare's worldwide fleet of storage and compute servers.

Responsibilities

• Work with software teams to validate bug fixes and assess performance of new firmware revisions
• Validate and deploy firmware updates to the fleet, monitoring the progress of the rollout for compliance and reliability
• Work with server and component vendors to obtain, debug, and maintain the latest updates
• Work with our Site Reliability Engineering teams to triage hardware problem reports
• Support our Data Centre Engineering teams in resolving hardware issues
• Develop and maintain automation tools to update firmware on servers and components in Cloudflare's fleet
• Communicate your results and updates through blog posts, internal talks, and tickets

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or Computer Science
• 3-5 years of experience
• Knowledge of bash and python and basic Linux task automation
• Knowledge of x86 server hardware including motherboards, CPUs, memory, storage and firmware updates
• Knowledge of configuration management principals, in particular Salt
• Knowledge of Redfish, IPMI and server remote management protocols
• Knowledge of running production mission critical systems

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with server hardware architecture
• Knowledge of debugging server hardware faults and the ability to engage with our sourcing team and vendors to improve quality
• Experience of managing large fleets comprising of thousands of servers
• Experience of observability and monitoring tools such as Prometheus and Grafana, and the ability to observe trends over time
• Experience with software development tools and processes such as git, Bitbucket and TeamCity and Jira