Systems Engineer, Product Platform Tools
Cloudflare · Austin, United States · 2mo ago
About Us
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
The Product Platform Tools team builds and operates Cloudflare's internal support and admin platform - the foundation that customer-facing and operational teams across the company rely on to do their jobs. As a Systems Engineer on this team, you'll design and build the backend services, infrastructure, APIs, and integrations that power this platform at enterprise scale, working closely with both engineering teams and non-engineering stakeholders like Support, Legal, and Security (who depend on it daily). You'll need a deep curiosity for how Cloudflare works under the hood, a strong security and governance mindset, the ability to scale systems to meet the demands of a global organization, and the communication skills to bridge technical complexity with the real operational needs of diverse teams across the company.
Responsibilities
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Design, implement, and operate backend services, infrastructure, APIs, and integrations that form the core of Cloudflare's internal support and admin platform, built to scale with the demands of a large, globally distributed organization.
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Partner with engineering teams across the company to onboard their support and admin applications onto the platform - understanding their requirements and ensuring smooth, well-governed, and scalable integration.
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Work directly with non-engineering stakeholders - including Support, Legal, and Security teams - to understand their operational needs and translate them into reliable, maintainable, and appropriately scaled platform capabilities.
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Own and continuously improve the platform's security and authorization posture, partnering with the Security and Legal team to ensure access control policies, governance requirements, and compliance standards are correctly implemented and enforced at scale.
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Ramp quickly into unfamiliar and legacy codebases, build context across a wide range of Cloudflare systems, and make thoughtful improvements that reduce operational toil and improve platform reliability.
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Participate in on-call rotations, respond to production incidents, and drive post-incident reviews to raise reliability and scalability standards across the platform.
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Contribute to platform observability, developer experience, and engineering standards with broad impact across the teams that depend on this platform.
Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience
Must-Have Skills
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5+ years of professional experience building and operating production backend services at enterprise or large-scale organizations, with strong proficiency in Go and/or TypeScript.
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Demonstrated experience in platform engineering, internal tooling, or support/admin systems — with direct experience supporting non-technical end users or customer-facing teams.
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Strong understanding of authorization and authentication systems such as OAuth 2.0, OIDC, JWT, OPA/Rego, role-base access control, policy based-access or similar and a security-first approach to system design.
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Proven scalability mindset — experience designing and operating systems that serve a large, diverse set of internal consumers with varying reliability and performance requirements.
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Proven ability to work across organizational boundaries: comfortable engaging with engineering teams, Security, Legal, and non-technical operational stakeholders alike.
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Confident working in unfamiliar and legacy codebases; able to ramp quickly, orient independently, and contribute incrementally without full context.
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Strong written and verbal communication — able to translate between technical implementation details and the business or operational needs of diverse stakeholders.
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Advanced, hands-on experience with Kubernetes and Docker in production environments — including cluster operations, resource management, networking, and debugging containerized workloads.
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Strong database experience — including schema design, query optimization, and operating databases in high-availability production environments.
Nice-to-Have Skills
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Experience building or operating internal support tooling, admin consoles, case management systems, or operational dashboards used by non-engineering teams at enterprise scale.
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Prior exposure to security governance workflows, compliance tooling, or partnering closely with a dedicated Security or Legal team on access control requirements.
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Familiarity with Cloudflare's product ecosystem (Workers, Access, Zero Trust, Gateway) as either a user or implementer.
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Experience with observability tooling and practices — including distributed tracing, structured logging, and metrics dashboards using tools such as Grafana, Kibana, Jaeger, or similar.
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Experience with Terraform for infrastructure-as-code and GitLab CI/CD for automated build, test, and deployment pipelines.
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Exposure to Temporal workflows or distributed workflow orchestration.
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!
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 hr@cloudflare.com or via mail at 101 Townsend St. San Francisco, CA 94107.