Systems Engineer

Position:
Systems Engineer, Spectrum Hybrid

Company:
Cloudflare

Location:
United States, Austin, TX

Short Summary:
As a member of Spectrum in the Packet Processing team, we're looking for a Systems Engineer who wants to take shared ownership of a critical, high-scale L4 proxy and help evolve it into the next generation of Cloudflare's non-HTTP traffic platform.

Responsibilities:
- The Spectrum edge dataplane (Go): TCP/UDP connection acceptance and forwarding, TLS termination, PROXY protocol, connection accounting, and eBPF integrations
- The Spectrum control plane (Go): application configuration APIs, provisioning, and the systems that push config globally to every edge machine
- Cross-dataplane integrations: how Spectrum fits together with Unimog for L4 load balancing, with Magic Transit for IP transit, with Argo Smart Routing for accelerated origin paths, etc
- Operational excellence: analytics pipelines, observability, on-call, incident response, and paying down technical debt in a product with a long production history
- Roadmap evolution: help shape where Spectrum goes next as the L4 counterpart to our HTTP proxy stack

Requirement:
- Experience building and shipping large-scale, reliable, highly distributed systems
- Strong programming experience in Go; familiarity with or willingness to work in Rust is a plus
- Solid understanding of L3 and L4 networking: TCP, UDP, IP, connection state, NAT, anycast, and packet flows
- Experience with Linux networking primitives — sockets, eBPF, network namespaces, netfilter/nftables, tc
- Experience designing and integrating RESTful APIs and backend systems
- Comfort with operating what you build in production — on-call rotations, incident response, and root-cause analysis
- Ability to reason about existing systems at scale: reading unfamiliar code, understanding hidden dependencies, and safely evolving software that has been in production for years
- Excellent debugging and optimization skills, particularly around performance and connection lifecycle issues
- Focus on clarity in written and verbal communication; ability to work across teams to land shared solutions

Benefits:
- Cloudflare is committed to providing equal employment opportunity for all people and values diversity and inclusiveness.
- Reasonable accommodations are provided to qualified individuals with disabilities.

Sound like something you’d like to be a part of? We’d love to hear from you!