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Senior Systems Engineer, MCP Server Portals

Cloudflare· Engineering
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Hybrid (Lisbon, Portugal)€66k - €91kFull-timePosted 3w ago

About the role

Senior Systems Engineer role on the MCP Portals team focused on designing, delivering, and operating distributed systems that authenticate users, manage OAuth credentials and sessions, enforce Zero Trust policies, and proxy MCP traffic across Cloudflare's global network.

Responsibilities

  • Lead the design, implementation, and operation of globally distributed services that connect MCP clients to authorized upstream MCP servers.
  • Own complex features and service improvements from problem definition and design through implementation, rollout, observability, and production support.
  • Shape technical decisions for MCP Portals, including service boundaries, security controls, compatibility, and tradeoffs among reliability, latency, and resource use.
  • Evolve our implementation as the MCP specification changes, planning safe migrations for existing customers and integrations.
  • Design and review authentication and authorization flows involving Cloudflare Access, OAuth, identity, credential handling, and delegated access to upstream services.
  • Improve the reliability and scalability of multi-tenant systems built on the Cloudflare Developer Platform, using production data to identify and prioritize work.
  • Strengthen observability through structured logs, metrics, traces, dashboards, and actionable alerts; participate in production support and incident response.
  • Lead investigations of complex customer issues across services and teams, identify root causes, and drive fixes that prevent recurrence.
  • Review designs and code, mentor engineers, and raise the quality of testing, deployment, and operational practices on the team.
  • Partner with product, security, and engineering teams to turn customer needs and emerging standards into maintainable product capabilities.

Qualifications

  • 6+ years of experience building and operating distributed systems, backend services, network services, or infrastructure products in production.
  • Demonstrated ownership of complex production services or projects, including architecture, implementation, rollout, and operational outcomes.
  • Strong programming skills in TypeScript, JavaScript, Go, Rust, C++, or another language used to build production services.
  • Deep understanding of HTTP, APIs, proxies, streaming connections, and distributed-systems failure modes.
  • Experience with authentication and authorization technologies such as OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, JWTs, PKCE, or policy-based access control.
  • Experience designing or operating security-sensitive systems, with sound judgment about identity, authorization, credential handling, concurrency, and state management.
  • Ability to diagnose difficult production issues using logs, metrics, traces, error reporting, and customer-provided evidence, then drive durable fixes.
  • Experience making backward-compatible changes to live systems and managing the risks of deployment and migration.
  • Clear written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain technical tradeoffs, influence decisions across teams, and mentor other engineers.

Skills

Required:Distributed systems / backend servicesProgramming languagesHTTP / APIs / proxies / streamingAuthentication & AuthorizationSecurity-sensitive systemsTroubleshooting / production issue diagnosisMigration / backward compatibilityCommunication / mentoring
Last updated Oct 14, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

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