Principal Systems Engineer, DevTools

Available Locations

• Austin, US

About the team and the role

The Developer Tooling team builds internal tools and platforms that improve the velocity and developer experience of Cloudflare's engineering teams. We own developer productivity (code commit to production), developer insights and ADLC metrics, developer infrastructure (CI/CD, build systems), AI-assisted development, and Cloudflare-on-Cloudflare dogfooding.

This team is responsible for AI-assisted development across all of Cloudflare engineering. Adoption has grown 4–6x in the last year. It's a small team, so you'll have a big surface area and real ownership from day one.

As a Principal Engineer, you'll build and operate the AI tools thousands of engineers use every day. It's a hands-on role with both engineering and operational responsibility. You'll be embedded with the DevTools Engineering Manager and help shoulder technical mentorship and end-to-end ownership of projects, while caring deeply about the experience of the engineers you build for.

What you'll do

• Ship features for our AI coding tools

• Build and improve AI and other developer-observability tools.

• Own our internal MCP servers (GitLab, Confluence, Jira, Backstage etc.).

• Build AI agents.

• Maintain our context engineering: shared configs, prompt libraries, and agent instructions.

• Wire AI tooling into CI/CD pipelines.

• Handle security and access controls for AI tools.

• Track adoption and usage across the org.

• Triage and respond to support in our tool channels.

• Own projects end to end - from roadmap and prioritization through delivery and operation.

• Mentor teammates and raise the bar through code review and design feedback.

• Help respond to and prevent incidents on the tools engineers depend on.

Desirable skills, knowledge and experience

• Strong coding ability in TypeScript, Go, Rust and Bash.

• Excellent debugging skills.

• Source control experience including branching, merging, and rebasing.

• Experience deploying and operating on Kubernetes or a similar platform.

• Comfort breaking down complex problems, weighing trade-offs, and driving them to done.

• A habit of mentoring and raising the bar for the people around you.

• Experience with, or strong interest in, building tools that improve DevEx

Bonus points

• Experience building LLM-based tools in production (agents, evals, cost and latency tuning).

• Experience with CI/CD systems and build tooling.

• Experience building on Cloudflare's platform (Workers, AI Gateway) - or eagerness to.

• Operating Kubernetes on-premise at scale (SRE, systems design, or architecture).

• Building platforms across multiple zones and regions.

• Prior work on a platform engineering or developer-productivity team.

• Open-source contributions to developer tooling or AI projects.

Compensation

Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.

Equity

This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare’s 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