New

Protocols Systems Engineer

Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, California, San Francisco
101 Townsend Street (Show on map)
May 21, 2025
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. We realize people do not fit into neat boxes. We are looking for curious and empathetic individuals who are committed to developing themselves and learning new skills, and we are ready to help you do that. We cannot complete our mission without building a diverse and inclusive team. We hire the best people based on an evaluation of their potential and support them throughout their time at Cloudflare. Come join us! Available Locations: Lisbon, Portugal or London, UK About the team: We are a team of software engineers who are responsible for the services which receive tens of millions of requests per second from the internet, at millisecond latencies, terminating HTTP and TLS, filtering and routing them, and forwarding them to the appropriate upstream services. Engineers in the team are involved in building and operating production systems at huge scale, handling the full breadth and diversity of traffic patterns on the internet. This includes accepting traffic over all HTTP protocols, working on new standards in conjunction with bodies such as the IETF and industry partners, and measuring and improving the behavior of all related systems. The team mostly works in Rust, with some time spent supporting legacy systems built with C and Lua. Some of the first projects you'll work on: Measure performance of HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 at scale in many different environments. Identify areas where the performance can be improved. Build the rust-based next-gen proxy that is replacing nginx and create a migration strategy for a functionality from old software to new software. Desirable skills, knowledge and experience Substantial hands-on systems level programming and troubleshooting experience. Experience operating high performance and huge scale services. A drive for continuous improvement when it comes to both operations and new product development Experience of working with Product teams to balance technical agenda, operation of existing systems and new product development Experience analyzing and communicating complex technical requirements and concepts, identify the highest priority areas, and carve 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 Nice to have Knowledge of web server implementations (such as NGINX) Detailed knowledge of HTTP and transport protocols (eg TCP, UDP, QUIC). Knowledge of Layer 4-7 protocols (examples: HTTP, TCP, UDP, QUIC, gRPC). Cryptography experience 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! 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 hr@cloudflare.com or via mail at 101 Townsend St. San Francisco, CA 94107.