Vulnerability Defense Software Engineer, Cloudforce One

Description

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.

Available Locations: Austin,TX and Washington, D.C.

Role Summary

Cloudforce One is Cloudflare’s threat operations and research team, responsible for identifying and disrupting cyber threats ranging from sophisticated cyber criminal activity to nation-state sponsored advanced persistent threats (APTs). Cloudforce One works in close partnership with external organizations and internal Cloudflare teams, continuously developing operational tradecraft and expanding ever-growing sources of threat intelligence to enable expedited threat hunting and remediation. Members of Cloudforce One are at the helm of leveraging an incredibly vast and varied set of data points that only one of the world’s largest global networks can provide. The team is able to analyze these unique data points, at massive scale and efficiency, synthesizing findings into actionable threat intelligence to better protect our customers.

As a Software Engineer on this team, you build and evolve systems that help security practitioners assess technical risk, investigate complex systems, prioritize issues, and deliver actionable guidance to engineering teams. You will be responsible for translating complex security requirements and investigative methods into robust, scalable, and high-performance applications that have a direct impact on making the internet better, safer, and more powerful every day.

Role Responsibilities

While the majority of our services are now written in Go and TypeScript, you will also work with technologies such as Rust, Kafka, Redis, Kubernetes, Terraform, and PostgreSQL. We also pride ourselves in dogfooding our own products and services so you will be extensively working with Cloudflare’s developer platform as well. We are looking for great engineers regardless of experience with any of these specific technologies.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, run, and scale distributed tools and services that translate security tradecraft into scalable, evidence-based systems and workflows.
• Partner with security practitioners to understand workflows, bottlenecks, and opportunities for automation.
• Improve system design and architecture to ensure stability, performance, and maintainability of both internal and customer-facing services.
• Analyze, communicate, and help prioritize complex technical concepts across teams.
• Mentor and guide other developers in the team, helping to build collective technical expertise and promote best practices for writing well-tested, modular, and reusable code.
• This role may require flexibility to be on-call outside of standard working hours to address technical issues as needed.
• Desirable Skills and Experience
• Working knowledge of cybersecurity concepts such as threat modeling, attack techniques, trust boundaries, exploitability, and defensive controls
• Familiarity with incident response workflows, network containment, and remediation
• Practical experience in vulnerability research/exploit development and translating findings into actionable mitigations
• Experience with AI-assisted development and designing agentic AI workflows
• At least 5 years of experience building large-scale software applications, preferably distributed systems
• Experience designing and integrating RESTful APIs and/or gRPC services
• Knowledge of SQL and common relational database systems such as PostgreSQL
• Ability to independently define and deliver solutions in ambiguous problem spaces
• Prior experience writing production-ready code in Go and/or TypeScript
• Excellent debugging and optimization skills
• Expertise in writing well-tested code
• Interest in opportunities to be a technical mentor for teammates
• Bonus/Nice-to-Have Skills
• Application security, security research, or security automation experience
• Deep understanding of DNS, TLS/SSL and HTTP
• Experience evaluating probabilistic systems

Conditions

For Washington D.C. based hires: Estimated annual salary of $150,000 - $206,000

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
• 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 : 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.