Principal Systems Engineer

Position Title : Principal Systems Engineer

About Us

At Cloudflare, we are on a mission to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the worlds 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 Magazines Top Company Cultures list and ranked among the Worlds Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company.

We realize people do not fit into neat boxes. We are looking for curious and empathetic individuals who are committed to developing themselves and learning new skills, and we are ready to help you do that. We cannot complete our mission without building a diverse and inclusive team. We hire the best people based on an evaluation of their potential and support them throughout their time at Cloudflare. Come join us!

Available Locations : Austin, Atlanta, Denver, Seattle, Washington D.C

About the role

We're seeking an exceptional Principal Engineer to join our newly formed Product Platform Task Forcea high-impact team that tackles critical infrastructure initiatives spanning our entire product suite and Cloudflare's massive edge network.

What you'll do

You’ll partner with engineering leadership to identify, architect, and drive execution on complex technical projects that transcend individual team boundaries, from organization-wide authentication and authorization systems to ultra-distributed architectures that leverage Cloudflare's global edge infrastructure, performance optimizations, and shared services that enable multiple products. This role is perfect for a seasoned technical leader who excels at solving ambiguous, high-stakes problems with broad organizational impact, mentoring senior engineers, and establishing technical direction that influences the entire engineering organization. You’ll have significant autonomy to shape our technical strategy while working collaboratively across product teams, platform engineers, and executive leadership to ensure our infrastructure scales efficiently and our engineering culture thrives.

Responsibilities

• Define technical strategy and lead execution of high-impact, cross-cutting initiatives that benefit the entire engineering organization, such as service-to-service authentication systems, RBAC / authorization frameworks, ultra-distributed architectures leveraging Cloudflare's edge network, API layer improvements, observability infrastructure, and shared services that span our product portfolio.
• Architect and implement security-critical systems including authentication, authorization, and access control mechanisms that work seamlessly across our distributed infrastructure, ensuring both robust security postures and excellent developer experiences for teams building on these platforms.
• Design and build ultra-distributed systems that take full advantage of Cloudflare's massive global edge network, including edge computing with Workers and Durable Objects, ensuring our services deliver exceptional performance and reliability to users worldwide while managing the complexity of geo-distributed state and coordination.
• Set architectural standards and technical direction for our Product Platform stack including Go services, Python pipelines, TypeScript edge computing (Cloudflare Workers / Durable Objects), and PostgreSQL data layer ensuring decisions balance immediate business needs with long-term scalability, maintainability, and engineering velocity.
• Identify critical technical debt, systemic inefficiencies, and infrastructure gaps across the organization, building business cases and driving consensus among leadership to fund and execute solutions that might otherwise fall through the cracks of product-focused roadmaps.
• Serve as a technical force multiplier by embedding with tiger teams or product groups that need deep infrastructure expertise, providing architectural leadership, hands‑on implementation where needed, and ensuring projects ship with production-grade reliability, security, and performance.
• Mentor and elevate senior engineers across the organization through code reviews, architectural discussions, and technical design reviews, establishing patterns and practices for distributed systems, security, and edge computing that raise the bar for engineering excellence throughout the company.

Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience :

Nice to Have Skills

Compensation

Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.

Equity

This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflares equity plan.

Benefits

Health & Welfare Benefits

Financial Benefits

Time Off

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.

Sound like something you’d like to be a part of? We’d love to hear from you!

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 hr@cloudflare.com or via mail at 101 Townsend St. San Francisco, CA 94107.

Equal employment opportunity, including veterans and individuals with disabilities.

PI279512345

#J-18808-Ljbffr