Systems Engineer - Compute Hardware

At Cloudflare, we have our eyes set on an ambitious goal: to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world’s largest networks that powers approximately 25 million 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!

What we do

• Anytime we push code, it automatically affects millions of Internet properties.

• Every day, thousands of new customers sign up for Cloudflare service.

• We serve 46 million HTTP requests per second on average.

• We serve data from 300 cities in over 100 countries around the world.

Our Story

How Cloudflare Began

In 2004, Matthew Prince and Lee Holloway set out to answer the basic question: “Where does email spam come from?” The two of them built a system that allowed anyone with a website to track how spammers harvested email addresses. Project Honey Pot was born.

Project Honey Pot quietly grew over the years. Lee’s flexible architecture adapted to track more of the threats that web administrators faced. Thousands of websites, from more than 185 countries, signed up to participate in the project. While users loved Project Honey Pot’s ability to track online malicious behavior, they had one repeated request: don’t just track the bad guys, stop them.

Cloudflare's First Office in Palo Alto

In 2009, Matthew had taken a sabbatical from his full time work to get his MBA from the Harvard Business School. There he met Michelle Zatlyn, now Cloudflare’s Chief Operating Officer. The two were talking one day when Matthew mentioned Project Honey Pot and its amazing community of users. Michelle immediately recognized the opportunity to create a service that would take Project Honey Pot to the next level: not just tracking Internet threats, but stopping them too. The classmates started to work on a business plan.

One of the first orders of business was coming up with a name. The first business plan was titled “Project Web Wall,” but that hardly resonated. A friend of Matthew’s suggested that they were creating a “firewall in the cloud,” so it should be known as Cloudflare. The name immediately felt right and stuck. Matthew and Michelle worked with the faculty at the Harvard Business School to refine the business plan. In the meantime, Lee built the first working prototype in his spare time. In April 2009, Cloudflare won the prestigious Harvard Business School Business Plan competition.

Lee was based in California and, after graduating from HBS, Michelle and Matthew headed west. The three co-founders spent the summer refining the Cloudflare prototype. They felt that Cloudflare solved a real need and set out to take Cloudflare to the next level. In November of 2009, Cloudflare closed its Series A financing with Ray Rothrock, from Venrock, and Carl Ledbetter, from Pelion Venture Partners.

Matthew Prince, Michelle Zatlyn, Lee Holloway

Matthew, Lee, and Michelle began to build the Cloudflare team. Recruiting before you have a product is always tricky, but one thing resonated with everyone: Cloudflare's core mission is to help build a better Internet. That was a project that smart engineers could get passionate about. Soon Cloudflare’s Palo Alto, CA offices began to fill with a talented team who hailed from top companies like Google, Yahoo, PayPal, and Mint.com.

The biggest concern that investors and advisors had was that Cloudflare’s solution, which was originally focused on securing websites, would introduce latency. The team became obsessed with stamping out latency anywhere in the system. In June 2010, Cloudflare quietly launched a private beta to select members of the Project Honey Pot community. The whole team held their breath. Then something surprising happened. Users began writing in that not only was Cloudflare protecting them against online bad guys, but their sites were loading, on average, 30% faster. The efficiency of Cloudflare’s system, the layer of caching for static resources, and the fact that Cloudflare was taking so much garbage traffic off its user’s sites meant Cloudflare not only offered security, it also offered incredible performance.

From the first discussions of Cloudflare back on the Harvard Business School’s campus in 2009, the plan was always to launch at TechCrunch. On September 27, 2010, Cloudflare did just that. The entire Cloudflare team gathered in an auditorium in downtown San Francisco at TechCrunch Disrupt. Early beta users were excited about finally being able to talk about the cool service they’d been using for months. And Matthew and Michelle stepped on stage to announce to the world Cloudflare’s launch. Since then, Cloudflare has launched dozens of products and hundreds of features over the course of 6 years, opened 6 offices across 3 countries, and brought 300 data centers online. All of these efforts have brought Cloudflare's benefits: security, performance, reliability and insights, to millions of customers around the globe.

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.

Path Forward Partnership: Since 2016, we have partnered with Path Forward, a nonprofit organization, to create 16-week positions for mid-career professionals who want to get back to the workplace after taking time off to care for a child, parent, or loved one.

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.