Senior Manager, Engineering

Cloudflare ·United States, Austin, TX / Washington, DC

Job Description

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.

About the Role

As the Senior Engineering Manager for Cloudflare Registry and Cloudflare Registrar, you will lead the core engineering team responsible for two foundational columns of Cloudflare’s ecosystem. Together, Cloudflare Registrar (servicing over 2 million customers with a current offering of over 430 domain extensions for purchase) and Cloudflare Registry (powering .gov hosting) enable seamless domain management and top-level domain hosting at massive scale across the global web.

Your mission will be to architect, scale, and innovate across the complete domain lifecycle-from purchasing across 430+ supported domain extensions and DNS integration via Registrar, to robust .gov hosting infrastructure, compliance, and registry operations via Registry.

You will manage a distributed, high-velocity team operating at the intersection of core Internet infrastructure, regulatory compliance, and massive system scale. In this high-visibility role, you will partner closely with Product Management, Security, and cross-functional platform teams to ensure our domain pipeline is rock-solid, highly available, and ready for the next generation of web infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Engineering Leadership: Recruit, mentor, and retain world-class systems engineers. Foster a high-agency culture focused on speed, reliability, and continuous delivery.
• Technical & Product Strategy: Partner with Product Managers and technical leaders to define the roadmap for domain management. Align architectural choices with long-term business and reliability goals.
• Operational Excellence: Own end-to-end operational health, including SLOs, incident response, customer escalations, and technical debt management across high-volume systems.
• Scale & Reliability: Oversee the architecture and scaling of tools and APIs that handle millions of domain lifecycle events, maintaining strict availability and low-latency responses.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Coordinate with legal, security, and registry bodies to navigate compliance requirements, ICANN policies, and domain security standards (e.g., DNSSEC).
• Culture of Quality: Drive robust testing, automated CI/CD workflows, and deep debugging practices to guarantee zero-downtime deployments for critical infrastructure.

Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience

• Experience: 8+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 4+ years directly managing engineering teams building scalable backend or infrastructure systems.
• Technical Depth: Hands-on background in systems programming (Go,Java, Typescript, Ruby/Rails or similar high-performance languages) with the ability to participate in system design reviews and unblock complex technical paths.
• Domain & Scale Expertise: Proven track record of operating high-throughput microservices, distributed data infrastructure, or public cloud platforms (GCP, Kubernetes).
• Communication: Exceptional ability to translate complex infrastructure and regulatory requirements into clear execution plans for technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• People Management: Demonstrated success growing senior engineers, shaping team culture, and driving accountability without sacrificing empathy.

Bonus Points

• Direct experience in the domain registry/registrar industry, ICANN compliance, or managing DNS/DNSSEC infrastructure.
• Experience building on or integrating with Cloudflare’s Developer Platform.
• Hands-on experience leveraging AI coding tools to optimize team productivity and workflows.
• Familiarity with OpenAPI standards, relational databases (e.g., Postgres), and observability suites (Prometheus, Grafana, Kibana).

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 View email address on click.appcast.io or via mail at 101 Townsend St. San Francisco, CA 94107.