Senior Systems Engineer

Responsibilities

• Design and implement end-to-end capabilities across the cloud control plane, Linux appliance runtime, telemetry pipeline, and deployment environments.
• Develop and harden Linux networking and appliance dataplane capabilities using IPsec, MASQUE, eBPF, and Linux kernel networking primitives.
• Build distributed control-plane and state-management systems for reliable configuration and command delivery across intermittently connected device fleets.
• Implement secure device lifecycle capabilities including hardware-backed identity, attestation, secure boot, immutable operating-system images, credential rotation, and staged over-the-air upgrades.
• Design telemetry, diagnostics, synthetic tests, support bundles, and remote operations for appliance observability and supportability.
• Work with customers, Product, Support, Solutions Engineering, and platform teams to turn requirements and production evidence into technical direction.
• Own architecture, implementation, staged rollout, monitoring, incident follow-up, failure analysis, and long-term maintainability.
• Set architectural direction, write technical proposals, conduct reviews, mentor engineers, and lead cross-team initiatives.

Requirements

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience building complex production systems.
• Strong skills in Rust, C/C++, Go, or a comparable systems programming language, including the ability to work with TypeScript.
• Strong understanding of Linux networking internals and experience with eBPF/XDP, netlink, and network namespaces.
• Experience designing distributed control planes, desired-state reconciliation, remote configuration, or similar systems for large intermittently connected fleets.
• Experience designing secure systems, including threat modeling, least privilege, credential handling, and software supply-chain integrity.
• Experience owning ambiguous initiatives from discovery through architecture, implementation, staged deployment, incident response, and failure analysis.
• Technical leadership, communication, stakeholder-influence, and system trade-off communication skills.
• Product judgment grounded in customer evidence, usability, and operational simplicity.
• Practical experience using AI-assisted engineering tools, coding agents, harnesses, or automation responsibly.
• Preferred experience includes networking products such as SD-WAN, SASE, SDN platforms, or network operating systems.
• Preferred experience includes custom or embedded Linux distributions and immutable image-based update systems such as RAUC, bootc, or OSTree.
• Preferred experience includes UEFI Secure Boot, TPMs, hardware-backed identity, remote attestation, high-availability failover, dynamic routing, multi-WAN, traffic steering or shaping, application identification, and local policy enforcement.
• Preferred experience includes fleet tests, hardware-in-the-loop or network-in-the-loop test environments, staged rollouts, and remote diagnostic tooling.

Benefits

• U.S. benefits include medical/Rx, dental, vision, flexible spending, commuter spending, fertility and family-forming benefits, mental health support, Employee Assistance Program, and global travel medical insurance.
• Financial benefits include short- and long-term disability, life and accident insurance, a 401(k) retirement savings plan, and an employee stock participation plan.
• Flexible paid time off and leave programs including parental, pregnancy health, medical, and bereavement leave.
• The role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare's equity plan.
• The role is available in Atlanta, Austin, Denver, Seattle, and Washington DC; candidates reaching the offer stage may be asked to attend an in-person interview at a Cloudflare office or hub.