Systems Engineer, Product Platform Tools

Location: Hybrid 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 The Product Platform Tools team builds and operates Cloudflare's internal support and admin platform, which customer-facing and operational teams across the company use to do their jobs. It includes the API gateway and authorization layer that control access to those teams' internal applications. We're hiring a hands-on backend engineer to build and evolve the services, APIs, and gateway for the platform. You'll set a high standard for how applications onboard onto the platform, taking an API-driven approach to contracts, access, and integration. You'll work with the engineering teams who onboard their apps and with the non-engineering teams who use the platform daily. You'll need curiosity about how Cloudflare works under the hood, a security-first mindset, and the communication skills to turn operational needs into reliable platform capabilities. Responsibilities API and gateway development: design and build the backend services, APIs, and gateway capabilities (routing, authentication, request handling, upstream integration) at the core of the internal admin platform. API-driven onboarding: set and raise the standard for onboarding applications onto the platform. Use clear API contracts, well-governed access, and a repeatable integration path so teams can onboard quickly and consistently. Stakeholder partnership: work directly with Support, Legal, and Security to turn operational needs into maintainable platform features. Security and authorization: own the platform's authorization model. Work with Security and Legal to implement and enforce access control, governance, and compliance requirements in code. Reliability of what you build: build observability and resilience into your services, take part in on-call for them, respond to incidents, and lead post-incident reviews. Engineering excellence: ramp quickly into unfamiliar and legacy codebases and make incremental improvements that reduce toil. Keep a high bar through code review and design docs. AI-assisted engineering: use AI coding tools as a normal part of how you design, build, and debug. Review their output with the same rigor you'd apply to any other code. Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience These are examples of what a strong candidate brings: Must-Have Skills Professional experience: 5+ years building and operating production backend services at scale. Languages: strong proficiency in Go and/or TypeScript. API gateway and API design: hands-on experience building or operating an API gateway or similar edge/proxy layer, and designing REST APIs. This covers routing, request lifecycle, authentication, and versioning. Authentication and authorization: strong understanding of OAuth 2.0, OIDC, JWT, RBAC, and policy-based access (such as OPA/Rego), with a security-first approach to design. Data: hands-on experience with PostgreSQL and Redis, including schema design, query optimization, and caching strategies. Cross-team collaboration: comfortable working with engineering, Security, Legal, and non-technical stakeholders, and explaining technical detail to each. Ownership and autonomy: confident in legacy code, self-directed, and able to drive ambiguous problems to resolution across team boundaries. Nice-to-Have Skills Experience building internal tooling, admin consoles, or case-management systems for non-engineering users. Exposure to security governance or compliance workflows, or working closely with a dedicated Security or Legal team on access control. Familiarity with Cloudflare's platform (Workers, Access, Zero Trust, Gateway). Experience running containerized services (Docker, Kubernetes), infrastructure as code (Terraform), and CI/CD with GitLab. Observability experience: distributed tracing, structured logging, and dashboards (Grafana, Kibana, Jaeger). 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 hr@cloudflare.com or via mail at 101 Townsend St. San Francisco, CA 94107.