Principal Software Engineer Distributed Systems (Config, Test, & Deployment)

Available Locations: Washington DC Austin NYC San Francisco

Cloudflares 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. Were 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 Intent Management organization which is part of the overall Foundational Engineering team at Cloudflare which builds and operates many of the fundamental systems powering Cloudflares products.

Too many of Cloudflares most impactful incidents have had unsafe change as a root cause. The Intent Management exists to make safe change the easy button and this is the most senior IC role in that organization reporting directly to the Senior Director. You will own the technical coherence of a platform that spans globally distributed key-value storage progressive release and configuration delivery and the testing and health-mediation systems that prove change is safe. Youll work at the seams that matter most by translating what Cloudflares Edge and control-plane platforms need into the primitives our teams build. Youll move fluidly between writing production code designing new systems and reviewing the proposals of other senior engineers. Youll also help us work out how best to integrate LLMs into our processes and systems.

You will be working alongside engineers who have presented at DevOps Days Config Management Camp 2024 & 2025 Monitorama OSMC KubeCon and PromCon. Together you will deliver on the key Health Mediated Deployment projects that are being tracked through senior leadership of Cloudflare up to the founders.

Examples of desirable skills knowledge and experience

• 10 years of software engineering experience with a demonstrated history of leading complex organization-wide technical initiatives that delivered measurable improvements to system performance reliability security developer productivity or engineering culture.
• Strong track record of technical leadership and influence without direct authority including driving consensus on technical decisions across multiple teams mentoring senior engineers and establishing architectural patterns that are widely adopted across an organization.

• Experience designing building and managing high volume global scale software applications.
• Expert in at least one modern strongly-typed programming language
• Knowledge of API design standards patterns and best practices
• Experience working with top tier LLMs to plan write test and deploy software

Bonus Points

• Strong interpersonal and communication skills with a bias towards action
• Experience with scaling and simplifying high scale Configuration Management systems
• Familiarity with Googles Prodspec and Annealing systems
• Experience with Kubernetes
• Experience with RocksDB or similar data stores
• Experience with health checking and probe platforms at significant scale
• Public evidence of technical leadership such as conference talks on distributed systems or security widely-read technical blog posts significant open source contributions or published architectural patterns that have been adopted by the broader engineering community.

Compensation

Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.

• For Bay Area based hires: Estimated annual salary of $230000 - $288000
• For Washington and New York City based hired: Estimated annual salary of $220000 - $275000
• For Austin based hired: Estimated annual salary of $200000 - $250000

Equity

This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflares 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

Were not just a highly ambitious large-scale technology company. Were 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 weve equipped more than 2400 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 Cloudflares 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 weve 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. Heres the deal - we dont 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 youd like to be a part of Wed 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 persons 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 or via mail at 101 Townsend St. San Francisco CA 94107.