Senior Systems Engineer

Cloudflare•Washington, DC

21d•$185,000 - $254,000

About The Position

This is a hands-on software engineering role on Cloudflare’s One Appliance team. The Senior Systems Engineer will shape and build the Linux-based edge runtime and distributed control plane that connect customer sites to Cloudflare, working across low-level systems, distributed services, and API design while providing technical leadership for major initiatives. The architecture follows a “light branch, heavy cloud” philosophy: policy and intelligence belong in Cloudflare’s network unless locality is required for correctness, survivability, performance, or user experience. The engineer will decide what belongs on the appliance versus in Cloudflare’s network and build systems that are secure, observable, resilient to partial failures, and safe to operate across a large fleet carrying customer-critical traffic.

Requirements

At least 8 years of professional software engineering experience building complex production systems.
Strong software engineering skills in Rust, C/C++, Go, or a comparable systems programming language, with the ability to work across the stack, including TypeScript.
Strong understanding of Linux networking internals and experience building against the kernel networking stack using eBPF/XDP, netlink, and network namespaces.
Experience designing and implementing distributed control planes, desired-state reconciliation, remote configuration, or similar systems for managing large, intermittently connected fleets.
Experience designing secure systems, including threat modeling, least privilege, credential handling, and software supply-chain integrity.
Track record of owning ambiguous initiatives from discovery through production, including architecture, implementation, staged deployment, incident response, and failure analysis.
Technical leadership and communication skills to influence decisions, explain system trade-offs to different audiences, and bring stakeholders toward a clear outcome.
Product judgment grounded in customer evidence, usability, and operational simplicity.
Practical experience using AI-assisted engineering tools, coding agents, harnesses, or automation responsibly to improve engineering quality and throughput.

Nice To Haves

Experience building networking products or systems, such as SD-WAN, SASE, SDN platforms, or network operating systems.
Experience building custom or embedded Linux distributions with immutable, image-based update systems such as RAUC, bootc, or OSTree.
Experience with UEFI Secure Boot, TPMs, hardware-backed identity, or remote attestation.
Experience building networking features such as high-availability failover, dynamic routing, multi-WAN, traffic steering or shaping, application identification, or local policy enforcement.
Experience building automated fleet tests, hardware-in-the-loop or network-in-the-loop test environments, safe staged rollouts, and remote diagnostic tooling.

Responsibilities

Design and implement capabilities spanning the cloud control plane, Linux appliance runtime, telemetry pipeline, and physical, virtual, and cloud deployment environments.
Develop and harden the appliance dataplane, building secure and reliable networking capabilities using technologies such as IPsec, MASQUE, eBPF, and Linux kernel networking primitives.
Build distributed control-plane and state-management systems that safely deliver configuration and commands, tolerate intermittent connectivity and partial failures, converge to known-good state, and support zero-touch operation across large device fleets.
Improve hardware-backed identity, attestation, secure boot, immutable operating-system images, credential rotation, and staged over-the-air upgrades with safe rollback and recovery.
Design telemetry, diagnostics, synthetic tests, support bundles, and remote operations that help customers and support teams understand the system.
Work with customers, Product, Support, and Solutions Engineering to understand customer requirements and turn them into pragmatic technical direction; revise decisions based on customer feedback or production evidence.
Prototype quickly, ship in safe increments, and own rollout, monitoring, incident follow-up, and long-term maintainability.
Set architectural direction for major initiatives, write technical proposals, conduct reviews, mentor engineers, and build executable plans with Cloudflare WAN, Gateway, DEX, the Cloudflare One Client, and platform and security teams.

Benefits

Medical/Rx insurance
Dental insurance
Vision insurance
Flexible spending accounts
Commuter spending accounts
Fertility and family-forming benefits
On-demand mental health support and Employee Assistance Program
Global travel medical insurance
Short- and long-term disability insurance
Life and accident insurance
401(k) retirement savings plan
Employee stock participation plan
Flexible paid time off covering vacation and sick leave
Leave programs, including parental, pregnancy health, medical, and bereavement leave
Eligibility to participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan