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Staff Software Engineer - Integrated Network Strategy

Cloudflare· Engineering
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Hybrid (Austin, TX / New York, NY / San Francisco, CA)full-timePosted 4w ago

About the role

Staff Engineer leading design, evolution, and operational excellence of Cloudflare's global network infrastructure, shaping capacity planning, hardware evolution, and architectural standards to scale the network across 337+ cities in 125+ countries.

Responsibilities

  • Design and evolve the architecture of Cloudflare's global network, including core infrastructure patterns, interconnection strategies, and edge deployment models
  • Establish and maintain design standards that enable consistency, reliability, and defensibility across heterogeneous deployments
  • Lead architectural reviews; anticipate technical debt and recommend major evolution initiatives, working across team
  • Own the design and continuous improvement of capacity management processes and systems used across infrastructure teams
  • Develop methodologies for forecasting demand, modeling growth scenarios, and optimizing resource utilization
  • Build tools, dashboards, and automated systems that make capacity planning visible, transparent, and actionable
  • Drive the evolution of network hardware and platform strategies, evaluating new platforms, vendors, and architectures
  • Lead technical evaluations of emerging technologies (silicon, switching architectures, routing protocols, optical transport, etc.)
  • Work with procurement, supply chain, and engineering teams to transition the network to next-generation platforms
  • Conceive and plan multi-year technical roadmaps for network infrastructure, anticipating growth patterns and industry dynamics
  • Conduct research into emerging infrastructure trends and translate insights into strategic recommendations
  • Lead architectural exploration and validation projects that de-risk future directions before large-scale commitment
  • Partner with infrastructure teams to translate architectural visions into operational realities
  • Work with finance and operations to understand cost implications and optimize infrastructure spend
  • Mentor and elevate the technical decision-making capability of engineering teams across the organization

Qualifications

  • 10+ years designing, operating, or planning large-scale network infrastructure at hyperscale (or equivalent)
  • Proven track record building greenfield network architectures and evolving them as business needs change
  • Deep, hands-on expertise with modern routing protocols (BGP, ISIS, RSVP-TE, QoS, traffic engineering)
  • Strong experience with software-defined networking, overlay networks, and programmable forwarding
  • Expert-level understanding of network economics: cost drivers, capacity planning, peering strategy, and trade-offs between performance, redundancy, and capital efficiency
  • Track record automating complex network operations and building extensible frameworks that scale across large teams
  • Experience designing and implementing DDoS mitigation strategies, firewall policies, and network security at scale
  • Ability to design intent-based systems that reduce operational complexity while maintaining flexibility
  • Strong systems-level understanding across the full stack: hardware, protocols, SDN, to application-level routing decisions
  • Experience leading network design, planning, budgeting, and sourcing decisions for large deployments
  • Ability to think 3–5 years ahead while shipping solutions today
  • Proven ability to influence without direct authority; comfortable presenting to senior leadership and non-technical stakeholders
  • Strong writing and documentation skills; ability to articulate complex technical decisions and trade-offs clearly
  • Experience mentoring junior engineers or leading teams through major architectural transitions
  • Comfortable working in a matrix environment with multiple stakeholders (product, operations, procurement, finance) and driving alignment

Skills

Required:Network architectureCapacity planningRouting protocols (BGP, ISIS, RSVP-TE)

Benefits

  • Note: Benefits are described in the job description context, but specific benefit items are not enumerated in the provided text.
Last updated Sep 23, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Cloudflare

Connect, protect, and build everywhere | Cloudflare

Make employees, applications and networks faster and more secure everywhere, while reducing complexity and cost.

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