Response Engineer

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.

Job Locations: Hybrid - Austin

To the attention of candidates:

This role requires full time work over the Weekends. Candidates should be comfortable working with a Tuesday - Saturday or Sunday - Thursday 5-day working week schedule. 

About the Department

Cloudforce One’s INTERDICT organization identifies, analyzes, disrupts, and responds to cyber threats targeting Cloudflare and its customers, from cybercriminal activity to nation-state-sponsored advanced persistent threats. Operating 24×7×365, INTERDICT combines PhishGuard’s managed email threat detection and response, Cloudflare Managed Defense Center’s application and network security monitoring and mitigation support, and Detection Engineering’s ML model development and detection optimization. The team leverages telemetry from Cloudflare’s global network, internal expertise, external partnerships, and expanding threat intelligence sources to conduct threat hunting, develop operational tradecraft, accelerate remediation, and deliver actionable intelligence across email, application, and network threat surfaces.

Description

The Response Engineer provide premium-level support for Cloudflare’s security products and features. Our largest and most technically sophisticated customers will contact Cloudflare Managed Defense Center for assistance and intelligence in dealing with threats or attacks on their infrastructure at OSI Layers 3, 4, and 7. This will span the range of Cloudflare security products from Magic Transit Infrastructure Protection, DDoS mitigation and Network Firewall, to using the Web Application firewall (WAF), Spectrum, Bot Management and Rate Limiting to help customers.

Response Engineers analyze threats, make detailed and informed suggestions for mitigation and may need to implement mitigation strategies directly on behalf of the customer. The team also provides attack reporting beyond Cloudflare’s self-service reports.

Responsibilities

• Monitor and investigate the alerts to identify attacks
• Work with Engineering and Operations teams to mitigate attacks, suggest steps to mitigate, and apply the appropriate mitigation, when applicable
• Work with Engineering and Product teams to improve the products and tools
• Extensive communications with customers via chat, email, and phone 
• Review the latest alerts to determine relevancy and urgency. Create new tracking tickets for alerts that signal an incident and require review or escalation
• Configure / Manage security monitoring rules and contribute to tool improvements
• Compare traffic signatures and attributes including IP addresses, cookie variations, HTTP headers, and JavaScript footprints to determine what is good traffic and what is malicious
• Participation in a weekend and holiday rotation required with main working hours 9 to 5 Pacific time 

Key skill sets

• Strong understanding of the OSI model, TCP, UDP, BGP, QUIC
• Advanced understanding of iptables
• Analysis of traffic for attack anomaly detection and creation of mitigation rules
• Experience in handling attack mitigation and thorough knowledge of various attacks (L3/4 and L7)
• At least 2 years of technical support experience and customer support experience is a must
• Strong communication skills with high-value customers 
• Command line / Bash shell
• Sysadmin skills (Linux/Mac/Windows) & Programming skills (Python, Ruby, PHP, C, C#, Java, Perl, Git etc.)
• Security skills and certifications preferred: CISSP, GCIA GCIH, GCFA, GCFE, etc.

Bonus Points:

• Previous DDoS mitigation for OSI layers 3,4, & 7, filter malicious traffic using Cloudflare tools like Magic Transit, Network Firewall, WAF, IP reputation lists, packet inspection, blacklisting, whitelisting, and/or rate limiting is a plus

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.