Senior Systems Engineer

We are looking for a Senior Systems Engineer to help build and manage tools that help engineers deploy and operate the services that make Cloudflare work. Our mission is to provide a reliable and flexible platform to help product teams release new software efficiently and safely. The role includes both software engineering and operational responsibilities.

Responsibilities

• Design and build scalable and resilient systems that can keep up with company growth.
• Design and build developer productivity tooling.
• Harden the platform against security threats and resource contention issues.
• Improve our development systems and practices.
• Improve the efficiency of managing resources such as CPU, bandwidth and storage.
• Work with application teams to understand their potential challenges and help them choose the best way to architect their systems.
• Drive initiatives that make our engineers happier and more productive.
• Help respond and prevent incidents impacting core platforms.

Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience

• Demonstrable professional experience building and managing large-scale distributed systems or Linux production environments.
• Proficiency in at least one systems programming or scripting language (e.g., Go, Rust, C/C++, Python) with a track record of writing clean, maintainable code.
• Experience managing containerized workloads at scale using Kubernetes, Docker, or similar orchestration platforms.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and automated testing strategies for infrastructure.
• Source control experience including branching, merging and rebasing.
• Strong analytical and troubleshooting skills, with a methodical approach to diagnosing complex system-level failures.

Bonus Points

• Experience with configuration management and infrastructure-as-code tools (e.g., Ansible, Terraform, SaltStack).
• Deep understanding of Linux/Unix operating system internals (e.g., storage subsystems, memory management) and core networking protocols (TCP/IP, DNS).
• Contributions to open-source systems software projects or active participation in the broader systems engineering community.