Senior Software Engineer - Kubernetes platform

Available Locations: Atlanta, GA; Austin, TX; Denver, CO; New York City; San Francisco, CA; Seattle, WA; Washington D.C.; Toronto, Canada

About the role

Many of Cloudflare’s critical internal services run on Kubernetes. These services include those responsible for Cloudflare’s control plane and APIs, data analytics and other internal tools used to manage our global network. These Kubernetes platforms are purpose-built from the ground up and run on bare metal Linux in different regions around the world. The scale we work at involves tens of thousands of containers and terabits per second of network traffic. The team takes pride in knowing this platform helps run parts of the global Internet.

As an engineer on the Kubernetes platform team, you'll be building the tools to help engineers deploy and operate the services that make Cloudflare work. Our mission is to provide a reliable and flexible platform to help product teams release new software efficiently and safely. The role includes both software engineering and DevOps operational responsibilities.

Responsibilities

• Design scalable and resilient systems that can keep up with company growth.
• Work with application teams to understand their needs and challenges, and help them choose the best way to architect their systems to run well in our Kubernetes environment.
• Harden the platform against security threats, noisy neighbours, and accidents.
• Improve the efficiency of our use of resources such as CPU, memory, bandwidth, and storage.
• Help respond to, resolve, and prevent incidents impacting the platform or our users.
• Contribute back to the open source community. Some of our favorite open source projects include: Envoy, Contour, Consul, etcd, cdk8s, Cloudprober, Calico, Ceph, Rook, KubeVirt, and more.

Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience

• Experience managing production Kubernetes clusters.
• Experience operating systems on-premise at scale in roles such as SRE, systems design or architecture.
• Excellent debugging skills in a Linux environment.
• Knowledge of how container runtimes work inside of Linux (isolation, storage, and networking).
• A firm grasp of IP networking including routing and iptables/nftables.
• Ability to work with codebases in Go, TypeScript, and Bash/shell.
• The ability to break down complex problems into smaller pieces, provide options, talk through trade-offs, build consensus, and drive the effort to solve the problem.

Bonus Points

• Familiarity with building platforms across multiple zones and regions as the foundation for other teams to build distributed highly-available applications.
• Experience with configuration management frameworks such as SaltStack or Ansible.
• Experience with continuous deployment tooling like ArgoCD and Argo Rollouts.
• Operational/administrator experience with etcd, Ceph, Rook, KubeVirt, CNIs, ClusterAPI, Envoy, and/or Contour.
• Experience as a user of Prometheus, Elasticsearch/Kibana, Vault, Redis, and/or Consul.

Compensation

Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.

• For San Francisco based hires: Estimated annual salary of $194,000 - $266,000
• For Denver based hires: Estimated annual salary of $168,000 - $231,000
• For New York City based hires: Estimated annual salary of $185,000 - $254,000
• For Seattle based hires: Estimated annual salary of $185,000 - $254,000
• For Washington D.C. based hires: Estimated annual salary of $185,000 - $254,000
• For Toronto, Canada based hires: Estimated annual salary of $150,000 - $206,000

Applications will be accepted until December 25, 2026.

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