Principal Systems Engineer, DevTools

Cloudflare ·United States, Atlanta, GA / Austin, TX / Denver, CO / 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 team and the role

The Developer Tooling team builds internal tools and platforms that improve the velocity and developer experience of Cloudflare’s engineering teams. We own developer productivity (code commit to production), developer insights and ADLC metrics, developer infrastructure (CI/CD, build systems), AI-assisted development, and Cloudflare-on-Cloudflare dogfooding.

This team is responsible for AI-assisted development across all of Cloudflare engineering. Adoption has grown 4-6x in the last year. It’s a small team, so you’ll have a big surface area and real ownership from day one.

As a Principal Engineer, you’ll build and operate the AI tools thousands of engineers use every day. It’s a hands‑on role with both engineering and operational responsibility. You’ll be embedded with the DevTools Engineering Manager and help shoulder technical mentorship and end‑to‑end ownership of projects, while caring deeply about the experience of the engineers you build for.

What you’ll do

• Ship features for our AI coding tools
• Build and improve AI and other developer‑observability tools.
• Build AI agents.
• Maintain our context engineering: shared configs, prompt libraries, and agent instructions.
• Handle security and access controls for AI tools.
• Track adoption and usage across the org.
• Triage and respond to support in our tool channels.
• Own projects end to end – from roadmap and prioritization through delivery and operation.
• Mentor teammates and raise the bar through code review and design feedback.
• Help respond to and prevent incidents on the tools engineers depend on.

Desirable skills, knowledge and experience

• Strong coding ability in TypeScript, Go, Rust and Bash.
• Source control experience including branching, merging, and rebasing.
• Experience deploying and operating on Kubernetes or a similar platform.
• Comfort breaking down complex problems, weighing trade‑offs, and driving them to done.
• A habit of mentoring and raising the bar for the people around you.
• Experience with, or strong interest in, building tools that improve DevEx
• Experience building LLM‑based tools in production (agents, evals, cost and latency tuning).
• Experience with CI/CD systems and build tooling.
• Experience building on Cloudflare’s platform (Workers, AI Gateway) – or eagerness to.
• Operating Kubernetes on‑premise at scale (SRE, systems design, or architecture).
• Building platforms across multiple zones and regions.
• Prior work on a platform engineering or developer‑productivity team.
• Open‑source contributions to developer tooling or AI projects.

Compensation

Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.

• For New York City, Washington, Washington D.C. and California (excluding Bay Area) based hires: Estimated annual salary of $230,000 – $281,000
• For Colorado based hires: Estimated annual salary of $200,000 – $275,000

Equity

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

Health & Welfare 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.

Time Off

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.

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.