Description
About the Role
Emerging Technologies & Incubation (ETI) is where new and bold products are built and released within Cloudflare. Leveraging Cloudflare's global edge and network, our team builds the products enabling the next era of the Internet: making domains Readable, Discoverable, and Callable for autonomous AI agents.
As a Senior Software Engineer, you will define the architecture, core protocols, and multi-team standards powering the next generation of agent-web interactions. You will shape product roadmaps, mentor engineers across Cloudflare, and write technical specifications that drive execution across multiple teams.
Responsibilities
- Architect and Ship Core Systems: Build high-throughput, resilient production services that make web properties Readable (structured content transformation), Discoverable (indexing and AEO), and Callable (WebMCP, tool-calling APIs, Generative UI) for autonomous agents.
- Define Emerging Agent Protocols: Lead integrations and protocol standards (MCP, MCP Apps, UCP, MPP, WebMCP). Author architectural specifications and technical designs that guide engineering work within and outside the ETI team.
- Product & Stakeholder Collaboration: Partner directly with Product Management, customers, and key stakeholders to translate customer needs into technical requirements, clarify KPIs, and shape engineering roadmaps.
- System Health & Observability: Drive continuous improvements in system health. Lead complex incident responses, conduct thorough post-incident retrospectives, and rearchitect systems to eliminate recurring failure modes and minimize customer escalations.
- Engineering Leadership & Governance: Elevate engineering standards across Cloudflare through technical mentorship, code reviews, architectural governance, and candidate evaluation for engineering hiring.
Desired Skills, Knowledge, and Experience
- Distributed Systems & Architecture: Demonstrated experience designing scalable system architecture and setting performance metrics in a distributed, high-scale environment.
- Technical Leadership & Specification: Track record of writing clear, comprehensive technical specifications and leading cross-functional engineering initiatives to completion.
- Web & Network Fundamentals: Deep understanding of HTTP, APIs, proxies, caching, web security, and performance bottlenecks spanning multi-service architectures.
- AI & Agent Ecosystems: Hands-on experience and a deep conceptual understanding of AI agents, tool calling, Model Context Protocol (MCP), or agent harnesses.
- Ambiguity & Iterative Delivery: Proven ability to partner with product managers and customers to navigate ambiguous problem spaces and iteratively deliver large-scale architecture.
- Mentorship & Operational Excellence: Experience mentoring junior and mid-level engineers, contributing to hiring, and driving improvements to engineering processes and incident response workflows.
Benefits
- Equity plan participation
- Competitive salary (€66,000 - €91,000 for Portugal-based hires)
Company Culture
Cloudflare values curiosity over bureaucracy and believes AI is a partner in solving tough problems to keep the Internet moving forward.