Senior Systems Engineer

Cloudflare•San Francisco, CA

11d•Onsite

About The Position

As a Senior Systems Engineer on the Cloudflare One Appliance team, you will shape and build the Linux-based edge appliance runtime and distributed control plane that connect customer sites to Cloudflare. The Appliance runs as physical hardware, a virtual appliance, and in public cloud environments. It gives customers a Cloudflare-managed way to operate hundreds or thousands of branch sites without building their own platform. This is a hands-on role for a product-minded engineer who can move between low-level systems, distributed services, and API design, while providing technical leadership for major initiatives. Our architecture follows a "light branch, heavy cloud" philosophy: put policy and intelligence in Cloudflare's network unless locality is required for correctness, survivability, performance, or user experience. The role requires strong technical judgment about that boundary. You will help us build systems that are secure, observable, resilient during partial failures, and safe to operate across a large fleet carrying customer-critical traffic.

Requirements

8+ years of professional software engineering experience, or equivalent demonstrated impact, building and operating complex production systems.
Strong software engineering skills in at least one of Rust, Go, TypeScript, or a comparable language, with the ability and willingness to work in other parts of the stack when needed.
Strong Linux systems and networking knowledge, including routing, TCP/IP, network namespaces, service supervision, firewall, packet and flow debugging, and a tunneling or secure transport technology such as IPsec, WireGuard, GRE, or MASQUE.
Experience building both Linux-based systems and cloud services, with the debugging skills to trace customer-visible failures across network, device, tunnel, control-plane, and upstream-service boundaries.
Experience designing distributed control planes, reconciliation or desired-state systems, remote configuration, or another system that manages state across a large and intermittently connected fleet.
Security judgment appropriate for software deployed inside customer networks, including threat modeling, least privilege, credential and key handling, software supply-chain integrity, and secure lifecycle design.
A 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 that let you influence decisions, explain system trade-offs to different audiences, and bring engineers and 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 with SD-WAN, SASE, network operating systems, enterprise edge devices, or products from vendors such as Cisco Meraki, Cato Networks, Fortinet, Juniper, or Palo Alto Networks.
Experience building custom or embedded Linux distributions with Buildroot, Yocto, or a similar system, and operating immutable or image-based systems using RAUC, bootc, OSTree, or equivalent update technology.
Experience with UEFI Secure Boot, TPMs, measured boot, hardware-backed identity, or remote attestation.
Experience packaging and operating virtual network appliances on VMware, KVM, or deploying appliances and network functions in AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
Experience with high-availability networking, dynamic routing, multi-WAN failover, traffic steering or shaping, application identification, or local policy enforcement.
Experience with Kubernetes or serverless control planes, event-driven systems, and observability platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana, ClickHouse, or OpenTelemetry.
Experience designing automated fleet tests, hardware-in-the-loop or network-in-the-loop test environments, safe staged rollouts, and remote diagnostic tooling.

Responsibilities

Build systems end to end: Design and implement capabilities spanning the cloud control plane, Linux appliance runtime, telemetry pipeline, and physical, virtual, and cloud deployment environments.
Build the Linux-based networking platform: Develop and harden the appliance dataplane. Build secure, reliable networking capabilities using technologies such as IPsec, MASQUE, eBPF, and Linux kernel networking primitives while keeping the system small, predictable, and secure.
Engineer reliable fleet control: 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.
Secure the device lifecycle: Improve hardware-backed identity, attestation, secure boot, immutable operating-system images, credential rotation, and staged over-the-air upgrades with safe rollback and recovery.
Make operability a product feature: Design telemetry, diagnostics, synthetic tests, support bundles, and remote operations that help customers and support teams understand the system without treating the appliance as a black box.
Drive customer-centered product decisions: Work with customers, Product, Support, and Solutions Engineering to understand customer requirements and turn them into pragmatic technical direction. Bring clear opinions, and revise them when customer feedback or production evidence points to a better answer.
Own production outcomes: Prototype quickly, ship in safe increments, and own rollout, monitoring, incident follow-up, and long-term maintainability.
Lead across teams: Set architectural direction for major initiatives, write clear technical proposals, conduct rigorous reviews, and mentor other engineers. 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 & Family Forming Benefits
On-demand mental health support and Employee Assistance Program
Global Travel Medical Insurance
Short and Long Term Disability Insurance
Life & 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