Principal Systems Engineer

Available Locations: San Francisco, US
About the department
Cloudflare's engineers build and operate the software that helps power 25+ million Internet properties and millions of businesses around the world. Across our engineering organizations, we have opportunities for high caliber, curious and empathetic people to take on big challenges and build some of the best skills in the industry. We're looking for talented team members to help build high-growth products, help scale our expanding network, build tools to improve availability, performance, uptime, and response times, and make systems failure-resistant and ready-to-scale.
Cloudflare is a fast growing company and engineering is an ever-evolving function with teams being formed and redefined often. You will interview for an engineering role in the Foundational Engineering team at Cloudflare, which builds and operates many of the fundamental systems powering Cloudflare's products.
About the Role
As an Engineer at Cloudflare you will be involved in designing, building and operating production systems at huge scale. These systems cover the entire path of customer requests, starting with receiving external traffic, routing through our internal reverse proxy network, and egressing that traffic to customer origins or other internal systems.
You will be working across multiple teams and projects, focussing on the areas most important to Cloudflare at any given time. This will include building maintainable systems, understanding and fixing problems with legacy systems, and measuring and improving performance and reliability.
Our tech stack is moving quickly towards Rust, Go (golang) and Typescript, but we have legacy systems built with many other technologies.
Desirable skills, knowledge and experience:

• Minimum 10 years professional experience as a Software Developer/Engineer
• Substantial hands-on systems level programming and troubleshooting experience.
• Experience operating high performance and huge scale services.
• Knowledge of Layer 4-7 protocols (examples: gRPC, TCP, UDP, HTTP, QUIC).
• Knowledge of network load balancing and routing techniques.
• A drive for continuous improvement when it comes to both operations and new product development
• Experience analyzing and communicating complex technical requirements and concepts, identifying the highest priority areas, and carving a path to deliver
• Driving communication and consensus across teams
• Ability to get things done: implementing tools, process, internal instrumentation, methodologies and resolving blockages
• Strong curiosity, a desire to learn new things, and teach others
• Cryptography experience, particularly around compliance (eg, FIPS)
• Knowledge of two or more mainstream programming languages

Bonus

• Strong interpersonal and communication skills with a bias towards action
• Experience managing internal and/or external customer requirements and expectations
• Demonstrable experience with high-quality technical writing
• Good Linux systems knowledge
• Experience with CI/CD, containers and/or virtualization, web servers, and databases

Compensation
Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location and level.

• Estimated annual salary of $234,000 - $260,000 USD

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