Senior Linux Engineer

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.

Linux Engineer

An engineering role at Cloudflare provides an opportunity to address some big challenges, at scale. We believe that with our talented team, we can tackle some of the biggest security, reliability and performance problems facing the Internet.

We are searching for Linux engineers to make our flavour of Linux fast, resilient and reliable across the many use cases that a distribution saving the Internet requires. 

Our Engineers come from a variety of technical backgrounds and work across a broad range of environments and codebases. Common qualities across all of our performance-focused engineers include a passion for analysis, optimization, scaling, networking, cross-team collaboration and hard problem solving.

What you would be doing

• Keep Cloudflare Linux platforms secure and up-to-date

• Help with quick and safe deployment and delivery of the Linux kernel and basic operating system to Cloudflare Datacenters in more than 335 cities in over 100 countries

• Continuously monitor and resolve kernel bugs and performance regressions

• Design tools and frameworks for other engineering teams to successfully embrace and enable the latest Linux kernel features and optimizations

• Help porting the Cloudflare software stack to new hardware platforms and architectures

• Research and adopt the latest Linux kernel security features and performance improvements

• Build tools and CI/CD pipelines for safe and automated operating system continuous deployment

Requisite skills:

• Experience with the Linux kernel and Linux software packaging

• CS fundamentals and comfortable working in multiple programming languages and codebases; Comfortable working in Go, Rust, C, Bash, and Python.

• Familiarity with constructing and using eBPF programs.

• Understanding of Linux and POSIX operation systems concepts: processing, files, syscalls, and networking

• Containerization technologies in Linux (e.g Docker, Namespaces, Cgroups)

• Configuration management (e.g Saltstack, Chef) and CI/CD pipelines

• Version control systems (git)

Examples of desirable skills, knowledge and experience

• Performance analysis and debugging

• Time series databases such as OpenTSDB, Graphite, Prometheus or Grafana

• Key/Value stores

• Network fundamentals DHCP, ARP, subnetting, routing, firewalls, IPv6, BGP

• Experience in a DevOps team structure

Bonus Points

• Experience with programming in C, Rust, Go, or similar languages

• Experience with rapid release engineering

• Upstream community contribution

• Strong tooling and automation development experience

Some tools that we use 

• Consul

• Docker

• Grafana

• Kubernetes

• Nginx

• Nomad

• PostgreSQL

• Prometheus

• Salt

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 released1.1.1.1 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 actualrace, 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 [email protected] via mail at 101 Townsend St. San Francisco, CA 94107.