Senior Network Engineer
Cloudflare · Hybrid
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Subject: Interested in the Senior Network Engineer role at Cloudflare
Hi Casey — I came across the Senior Network Engineer opening and wanted to reach out directly. I've spent the last few years doing exactly this kind of work, and Cloudflare stood out because…
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About the role
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 Location: Austin, Atlanta, Denver, Seattle, Mexico City, Mexico
Role Summary
Cloudflare operates one of the world's largest and most interconnected networks, spanning 335+ cities across every region of the globe. We are looking for a Senior Network Engineer to join our Edge Network & Backbone team — someone who brings deep operational experience, an AI-first mindset, and the instinct to mentor and lift the engineers around them. In your first year, this role is deliberately hands-on: you'll be in the operational trenches, owning complex faults, driving capacity work, and setting the standard for how we run the network. Beyond that, you'll help shape how the team works — building AI-enabled tooling and agents that reduce toil, accelerate troubleshooting, and make the whole team more effective. This is a North American based role, but you'll be joining one global team: the sun never sets on Cloudflare, and our engineers hand off work across every time zone to keep the network running around the clock.
Role Responsibilities
- Own the technical operation, engineering, and architecture of Cloudflare's global network, including planning, installation, and day-to-day management of hardware and software across the edge and backbone.
- Serve as a hands-on operational anchor for the team — diagnosing and resolving complex network faults, owning incident response end-to-end including on-call rotation, and contributing to post-incident reviews to drive continuous improvement.
- Build production AI agents for network operations. Design, ship, and own LLM-powered tools that integrate with our operational systems of record via tool calling. Ship them with evals, observability of agent decisions, cost tracking, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints where autonomous action carries blast radius.
- Apply AI to accelerate troubleshooting. Use and extend our internal AI platform (Workers AI, AI Gateway) to speed up root cause analysis, pattern recognition across faults, and operational decision-making under pressure.
- Architect network improvements that lower latency, reduce packet loss, and increase scale — optimising end user experience across Cloudflare's global infrastructure.
- Mentor and develop junior engineers on the team, setting technical standards, conducting structured troubleshooting sessions, and building a culture of operational excellence and continuous learning.
- Collaborate with internal teams on cross-functional network projects, contributing to design documentation, SOPs, and knowledge base articles that outlast any individual contributor.
Role Requirements (Must-Have Skills)
- Proven track record in large-scale network engineering and operations.
- Proficiency in Python and/or TypeScript and/or Go sufficient to build, debug, and maintain agent code, not just to glue scripts together.
- Working knowledge of agent integration patterns: function/tool calling, MCP or equivalent, retrieval over operational corpora (runbooks, postmortems, change history), and prompt iteration with evals.
- Experience reasoning about agent failure modes in production: hallucination guards, fallback paths, rollback, blast-radius control.
- Deep expertise in BGP and anycast routing, with the ability to diagnose and resolve complex routing issues in a production environment.
- Strong understanding of MPLS and Segment Routing.
- Proficiency across multiple network vendor operating systems (Juniper, Cisco, Arista, or similar).
- Experience with network automation frameworks such as SaltStack, Ansible, or equivalent, and a strong instinct for solving operational problems through code.
- Ability to prioritise effectively and lead calmly when faced with high-pressure scenarios.
- An effective communicator who can adapt their style to any audience — whether guiding a junior engineer through a fault or presenting a network architecture decision to senior leadership.
Nice-to-Have Skills
- Shipped LLM-powered tooling into production use by a team other than your own, with measurable operational impact.
- Professional-level network certification (JNCIP, CCNP, or equivalent or higher).
- Experience with optical transport technologies such as CWDM and DWDM.
- Linux system administration.
- Experience writing network configuration and design documentation at an architectural level.
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.
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