Senior Software Engineer - Kubernetes platform

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.

Available Locations: Atlanta, GA; Austin, TX; Denver, CO; New York City; San Francisco, CA; Seattle, WA; Washington D.C.; Toronto, Canada

About the role

Many of Cloudflare’s critical internal services run on Kubernetes. These services include those responsible for Cloudflare’s control plane and APIs, data analytics and other internal tools used to manage our global network. These Kubernetes platforms are purpose-built from the ground up and run on bare metal Linux in different regions around the world. The scale we work at involves tens of thousands of containers and terabits per second of network traffic. The team takes pride in knowing this platform helps run parts of the global Internet.

As an engineer on the Kubernetes platform team, you'll be building the tools to help engineers deploy and operate the services that make Cloudflare work. Our mission is to provide a reliable and flexible platform to help product teams release new software efficiently and safely. The role includes both software engineering and DevOps operational responsibilities.

Responsibilities

• Design scalable and resilient systems that can keep up with company growth.
• Work with application teams to understand their needs and challenges, and help them choose the best way to architect their systems to run well in our Kubernetes environment.
• Harden the platform against security threats, noisy neighbours, and accidents.
• Improve the efficiency of our use of resources such as CPU, memory, bandwidth, and storage.
• Help respond to, resolve, and prevent incidents impacting the platform or our users.
• Contribute back to the open source community. Some of our favorite open source projects include: Envoy, Contour, Consul, etcd, cdk8s, Cloudprober, Calico, Ceph, Rook, KubeVirt, and more.

Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience

• Experience managing production Kubernetes clusters.
• Experience operating systems on-premise at scale in roles such as SRE, systems design or architecture.
• Excellent debugging skills in a Linux environment.
• Knowledge of how container runtimes work inside of Linux (isolation, storage, and networking).
• A firm grasp of IP networking including routing and iptables/nftables.
• Ability to work with codebases in Go, TypeScript, and Bash/shell.
• The ability to break down complex problems into smaller pieces, provide options, talk through trade-offs, build consensus, and drive the effort to solve the problem.

Bonus Points

• Familiarity with building platforms across multiple zones and regions as the foundation for other teams to build distributed highly-available applications.
• Experience with configuration management frameworks such as SaltStack or Ansible.
• Experience with continuous deployment tooling like ArgoCD and Argo Rollouts.
• Operational/administrator experience with etcd, Ceph, Rook, KubeVirt, CNIs, ClusterAPI, Envoy, and/or Contour.
• Experience as a user of Prometheus, Elasticsearch/Kibana, Vault, Redis, and/or Consul.

Compensation

Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.

• For San Francisco based hires: Estimated annual salary of $194,000 - $266,000
• For Denver based hires: Estimated annual salary of $168,000 - $231,000
• For New York City based hires: Estimated annual salary of $185,000 - $254,000
• For Seattle based hires: Estimated annual salary of $185,000 - $254,000
• For Washington D.C. based hires: Estimated annual salary of $185,000 - $254,000
• For Toronto, Canada based hires: Estimated annual salary of $150,000 - $206,000

Applications will be accepted until December 25, 2026.

Equity

This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare's equity plan.

Benefits

Cloudflare offers a complete package of benefits and programs to support you and your family. Our benefits programs can help you pay health care expenses, support caregiving, build capital for the future and make life a little easier and fun! The below is a description of our benefits for employees in the United States, and benefits may vary for employees based outside the U.S.

Health & Welfare 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

Financial Benefits

• Short and Long Term Disability Insurance
• Life & Accident Insurance
• 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan
• Employee Stock Participation Plan

Time Off

• Flexible paid time off covering vacation and sick leave
• Leave programs, including parental, pregnancy health, medical, and bereavement leave

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 [email protected] or via mail at 101 Townsend St. San Francisco, CA 94107.