Senior Systems Engineer, Identity & Access Management

Available Locations

• Austin, US
• Atlanta, GA
• Denver, CO
• San Francisco, CA
• Washington D.C.

About the Role

Cloudflare runs one of the world's largest networks, and every API call that configures it, from any customer, integration, or internal service, starts by proving who is calling and what they're allowed to do. The IAM team owns the authentication and authorization systems behind that: the identity layer of the Control Plane operating at global scale. Our surface spans things like login and SSO, OAuth and API tokens, account membership, roles and permissions, and SCIM provisioning.

We're hiring a hands-on senior engineer to work on correctness-critical, high-throughput, highly resilient services. You'll own surfaces end-to-end, chase down hard problems with high agency, and improve systems while they're serving production traffic.

Responsibilities

• Feature development: design and build high-throughput, low-latency IAM capabilities that power both customer-facing and internal service APIs.

• System evolution: contribute to the design and evolution of our authentication and authorization systems into modern, distributed, and edge-capable architectures.

• API and system design: translate product and security requirements into robust, well-structured APIs and technical specifications in collaboration with Product, Security, and UX teams.

• Engineering excellence: maintain a high bar through thorough code reviews, technical design documents, and collaborative problem-solving.

• Operational stewardship: own the reliability of the platform under constant load, ensuring observability and resilience are built into every service.

• AI-assisted development: use AI tools throughout your workflow, from code generation to debugging, and bring the judgment to know when to trust them.

Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience

These are examples of what a strong candidate brings:

• Professional Experience: 5-8 years building and operating production systems at scale.

• Identity Domain Knowledge: Working knowledge of identity protocols and models (OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML, SCIM, RBAC/ABAC, and session management, etc.). Hands-on experience implementing identity protocols or fine-grained authorization systems, RBAC, ABAC, relationship-based access control, or policy engines (such as Cedar), in production.

• Language Proficiency: Proficiency in languages like Go and Typescript and comfort working across Cloudflare’s tech stack.

• API Design: Experience designing and building REST APIs: routing, authentication, request lifecycle, and versioning.

• Database & Storage: PostgreSQL and Redis experience: schema design, query optimization, caching strategies, and consistency tradeoffs.

• Distributed Systems: Strong distributed systems intuition: consistency models, event-driven replication, and the implications of global state propagation.

• High Agency: High standards for correctness and security; curious, self-directed, and comfortable driving ambiguous problems to resolution across team boundaries.

Bonus Points

• Experience with credential and token lifecycle systems: issuance, rotation, scoping, revocation, or service-to-service authentication at scale.

• Familiarity with the Cloudflare developer platform: Workers, Durable Objects, KV, R2, etc.

• Experience incrementally re-architecting a large, long-lived codebase under production traffic, and familiarity with containerized deployment (Docker, Kubernetes), infrastructure as code (Terraform), and observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, Kibana).

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