Senior Software Engineer, Cloudflare for SaaS

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.

Available Location:  Austin

Job Title: Senior Software Engineer, Cloudflare for SaaS

Role Summary

Cloudflare for SaaS lets SaaS providers offer their services on domains branded for each customer, rather than on the provider's own domain. The product powers customer domains and automates the complex work behind onboarding domains, validating ownership, issuing and renewing certificates, and safely deploying configuration across Cloudflare's global network.

The team builds the APIs and control-plane systems used by some of the world's largest platforms. We are evolving these systems to support tens of millions of customer domains, faster and more reliable APIs, simpler configuration at scale, and more Cloudflare products for each customer domain. This work combines customer-facing product development with challenging problems in distributed systems, data modeling, state consistency, observability, and operational reliability.

Cloudflare is looking for a Software Engineer to design, build, and operate the services behind Cloudflare for SaaS. You will work primarily on backend services and RESTful APIs in Go and other languages, modernize legacy control-plane workflows, and improve the reliability and scalability of production systems. You will collaborate with product managers and engineers across Cloudflare, write clear technical specifications, review code, instrument services, and help diagnose and resolve operational issues.

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and operate reliable backend services and APIs for managing customer domains and their configuration.
• Evolve the control plane to support tens of millions of customer domains without sacrificing correctness, availability, or API performance.
• Improve certificate and domain lifecycle workflows, including onboarding, validation, renewal, migration, and safe deletion.
• Model ownership and shared state carefully so changes remain consistent across distributed services and configuration stores.
• Build useful observability, alerts, and operational procedures, and participate in debugging and incident response.
• Collaborate across engineering and product teams, document designs and tradeoffs, and review the work of fellow engineers.

Role Requirements (Must-Have Skills)

• 3+ years of professional experience building backend systems at a technology company.
• Experience writing production-quality code in Go or another language, with a willingness to learn Go.
• Experience designing, building, and operating distributed systems or high-scale services.
• Strong debugging and troubleshooting skills across applications, data stores, and production environments.
• Proficiency with modern Unix/Linux development and runtime environments.
• A track record of delivering well-tested, reliable code and taking ownership of it in production.
• Clear written and verbal communication, including the ability to explain technical decisions and tradeoffs.

Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience

• Experience designing and evolving RESTful APIs used by external customers.
• Working knowledge of SQL and relational databases such as PostgreSQL, including schema and query design.
• Understanding of distributed-systems concerns such as consistency, caching, concurrency, and failure recovery.
• Experience modernizing legacy systems or migrating workflows to a service-oriented architecture.
• Experience with observability tools and practices, including metrics, logs, tracing, alerting, and SLOs.
• Familiarity with PKI/TLS, certificate lifecycle management, ACME, DNS, or domain validation.
• Experience with message queues, Kubernetes, or globally distributed configuration systems.
• Interest in building intuitive product experiences for customers managing large fleets of domains.

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.