Principal Systems Engineer - Application Security / Threat Detection

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. 

We realize people do not fit into neat boxes. We are looking for curious and empathetic individuals who are committed to developing themselves and learning new skills, and we are ready to help you do that. We cannot complete our mission without building a diverse and inclusive team. We hire the best people based on an evaluation of their potential and support them throughout their time at Cloudflare. Come join us! 

Available Locations: London

About The Team

We are a group of around 100 Engineers responsible for Cloudflare’s fast-growing security product portfolio (WAF, Page Shield, Bot detection, API Shield and DDoS protection). Being part of Cloudflare means we work at internet scale and the challenges you’ll face here are unique to our position of being connected to more networks than any other provider worldwide. Working at great scale by default (to an extent not offered by most other employers in big tech) means pushing boundaries well beyond what commodity solutions like Nginx and Kafka provide out of the box. You’ll be working with custom components that have been created in an engineering-driven and pragmatic way - our code is well-tested and documented and uses modern languages like Go and Rust. This gives you confidence that you will spend your time having an impact and not firefighting!

Application Security is the single biggest contributor to Cloudflare’s annual revenue and has ambitious goals for growth. This means you’d be joining a high-profile part of the business that can really accelerate and support your career. Cloudflare has a strong track record of growing in a thoughtful way and hires carefully so we’re confident that you will enjoy working with your colleagues here!

About You

You’re a high-performing Senior Staff or Principal Engineer in a technical leadership role in cyber security. You have a strong background in threat detection and have contributed to industry groups like OWASP and / or conferences like S&P, CCS, USENIX Security or NDSS. 

The scope of this role involves working across multiple teams so you will be excited by both having impact through other Engineers and making deep individual contributions to our codebase - not just one or the other. This is very important!

Cloudflare’s culture is busy and multifaceted, and people who succeed here are persistent, have a can-do attitude and a genuine willingness to assume good faith in others. This last quality in particular requires them to be empathetic and emotionally intelligent. This role is as senior as it gets for an Engineering IC and this means you will need to take a more than average share of responsibility for the culture that you create around you, so you’ll have experience here and will be willing to accept that responsibility.

What You’ll Do

• Provide expert-level guidance across multiple engineering teams in detecting current and emerging security risks to web applications. Keep up to date with trends in this space and provide leadership to Product and Engineering colleagues.
• Own an engineering roadmap and work with Engineering Managers and Engineering Directors in getting buy-in from teams and senior stakeholders.
• Write code following bleeding edge industry best practices and provide leadership in following these. Review RFCs, technical specifications and PRs.
• Mentor and grow other Engineers.

Required Skills and Experience

• Extensive experience of cyber security and in particular detecting emerging threats (e.g. OWASP Top Ten).
• Experience with threat detection based on Machine Learning.
• Very skilled hands-on writing lean and effective code according to modern best practices. The specific languages and tech stack you’re used to aren’t important as long as you’re open to learning Python, Rust and Clickhouse to an expert level, plus other languages and technologies as required.
• Skilled deploying and maintaining live software-based services at great scale (e.g. 10m+ requests / second, 100m+ users).
• Experience leading engineering teams, e.g. as a Tech Lead or in a Systems Architect role.

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: We equip politically and artistically important organizations and journalists 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: We created 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.

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!

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.

Cloudflare provides reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities.  Please tell us if you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job. Examples of reasonable accommodations include, but are not limited to, changing the application process, providing documents in an alternate format, using a sign language interpreter, or using specialized equipment.  If you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job, please contact us via e-mail at hr@cloudflare.com or via mail at 101 Townsend St. San Francisco, CA 94107.