Systems Engineer, MCP Portals

Cloudflare•San Francisco, CA

4d•$45,000 - $62,000•Remote

About The Position

As a Systems Engineer on the MCP Portals team, you will build and operate the distributed systems that authenticate users, manage OAuth credentials and sessions, enforce Zero Trust policies, and proxy MCP traffic across Cloudflare's global network. You will work with engineers and product managers across Access, Gateway, and Developer Platform teams to advance a rapidly evolving protocol and product. We are looking for a thoughtful engineer who enjoys solving ambiguous systems problems and taking responsibility for services in production.

Requirements

Experience building and operating reliable distributed systems, backend services, network services, or infrastructure products in production.
Strong programming skills in TypeScript, JavaScript, Go, Rust, C++, or another systems-oriented language.
A solid understanding of HTTP, APIs, proxies, streaming connections, and common distributed-systems failure modes.
Experience debugging production systems using logs, metrics, traces, error reporting, and customer-provided evidence.
Ability to reason carefully about security boundaries, credential handling, concurrency, state management, and backward-compatible deployments.
Clear written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to coordinate investigations and solutions across team boundaries.
Applicants should provide a resume or CV describing relevant engineering and operational experience.

Nice To Haves

Experience with authentication and authorization technologies such as OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, JWTs, PKCE, or policy-based access control.
Experience with the Model Context Protocol or other rapidly evolving application protocols.
Prior MCP experience is helpful but not required.
Familiarity with the Cloudflare Developer Platform, or other serverless edge-computing platforms.
Experience building gateways, forward proxies, identity systems, developer platforms, or Zero Trust and data loss prevention products.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and operate the globally distributed services that connect MCP clients to authorized upstream MCP servers.
Evolve our implementation as the MCP specification changes.
Build secure authentication and authorization flows involving Cloudflare Access, OAuth, identity, and delegated access to upstream services.
Improve the reliability, scalability, latency, and resource efficiency of multi-tenant systems built on the Cloudflare Developer Platform.
Develop observability through structured logs, metrics, traces, dashboards, and actionable alerts, and participate in production support and incident response.
Investigate customer issues across multiple services and teams, distinguishing product defects from upstream failures, policy configuration, and infrastructure dependencies.
Collaborate with product, security, and engineering partners to turn customer needs and emerging standards into well-tested, maintainable product capabilities.