About Us
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, Lisbon, or London (Hybrid)
About the Role
Emerging Technologies & Incubation (ETI) is where new and bold products are built and released within Cloudflare. Rather than being constrained by the structures which make Cloudflare a massively successful business, we are able to leverage them to deliver entirely new tools and products to our customers. Cloudflare’s edge and network make it possible to solve problems at massive scale and efficiency which would be impossible for almost any other organization.
The Workers Runtime team delivers features and improvements to our Runtime which actually executes customer code at the edge. We care deeply about increasing performance, improving JS API surface area and compiled language support through WebAssembly, and optimizing to meet the next 10x increase in scale. The Runtime is a hostile environment - system resources such as memory, cpu, I/O, etc need to be managed extremely carefully and security must be foundational in everything we do.
Our work is deeply systems-oriented. We build and maintain the C++ and Rust codebase that embeds the JavaScript engine, manages isolate lifecycles, enforces resource limits (CPU, memory, I/O), and orchestrates how customer scripts are loaded, cached, and executed. We operate in a hostile multi-tenant environment where security must be foundational — from side-channel attack mitigations to isolate sandboxing — and performance is measured in microseconds.
Responsibilities
You will lead the Workers Runtime - Edge team, owning the runtime service in production across Cloudflare’s fleet and driving the architectural evolution of the platform.
- Lead a team of senior systems engineers working in C++ and Rust on one of Cloudflare’s most performance-critical and security-sensitive services.
- Drive major infrastructure initiatives, including migrating legacy systems, redesigning core abstractions, and laying the groundwork for next-generation runtime architecture.
- Own reliability and release safety for a service handling tens of millions of requests per second.
- Improve release processes, invest in health monitoring and automated rollback, and help the team ship changes confidently at scale.
- Make prioritisation calls between customer-unblocking feature work and foundational investment in security, reliability, and developer velocity.
- Partner closely with adjacent teams across the Developer Platform to ensure the runtime supports the broader product roadmap, including compute, storage, networking, and observability.
- Hire, grow, and develop strong systems engineers; set clear expectations, provide technical mentorship, and create an environment where people do their best work.
Desirable Skills, Knowledge & Experience
- Experience leading a team.
- Comfortable leading and hiring a team that builds low-level distributed systems.
- Strong planning skills, with experience creating teams and overseeing execution to meet commitments predictably.
- Comfortable building developer-loved APIs that scale.
- Track record of leading a team through hiring, onboarding, and professional development.
- Ability to explain both the “why” and the “how.”
- Experience implementing tools, process improvements, internal instrumentation, methodologies, and resolving blockages.
- At least 4 years of recent professional experience with C++ or Rust.
- Solid understanding of computer science fundamentals, including data structures, algorithms, and object-oriented or functional design.
- Deep understanding of the web and technologies such as web browsers, HTTP, JavaScript, and WebAssembly.
- Strong understanding of Linux systems programming, process models, and networking.
Bonus Points
- Experience building high-performance distributed systems.
- Experience working with cloud platforms, especially server-less platforms.
- Experience with the internals of JS engines such as V8, SpiderMonkey, or JavaScriptCore.
- Experience with standalone WebAssembly runtimes such as Wasmtime, Wasmer, Lucet, etc.
- Deep Linux/UNIX systems, kernel, or networking knowledge.
- Contributions to large open source projects.
- Experience working in low-latency real-time environments such as game streaming, game engine architecture, high-frequency trading, or payment systems.
- Experience debugging, optimizing, and identifying failure modes in a large-scale Linux-based distributed system.
Compensation
Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.
● For New York City, New Jersey, Washington, Washington DC, and California (excluding Bay Area) based hires: Estimated annual salary of $220,000 - $303,000
● For Portugal based hires: Estimated annual salary is between €89,000 - €122,000.
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.
1.1.1.1: 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.
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.