Principal Systems Engineer

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.

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

Available Locations: Lisbon, Portugal or London, UK
About The Department
Cloudflare's Billing Engineering Team is at the heart of every product launch, campaign, and initiative that Cloudflare undertakes. We build and maintain critical systems for billing, payments, usage metering, aggregation, invoicing and revenue recognition — powering billions in revenue and serving millions of customers.

Currently we're rebuilding our entire billing platform, designing a metering and aggregation layer that scales effortlessly while ensuring financial accuracy. This is high-impact, high-stakes work that touches all Cloudflare's cutting-edge products like AI, Zero Trust, Edge Compute, Bot Management, DDoS Protection, etc.

As a Principal Systems Engineer, you'll lead a team of talented, collaborative engineers working across Cloudflare's ecosystem. You'll navigate multiple high-profile projects, foster a culture of proactive communication and continuous learning, and drive technical excellence.

If you thrive on solving hard challenges at the intersection of financial infrastructure and distributed systems, this is your opportunity to make a massive impact while growing with us.

What You'll Do
We are looking for an energetic team-focused engineer who is growth mindset oriented, able to drive their work from inception, requirements definition, technical specification phase, development, testing and go live.

You will work on a range of transactional microservices written in Go. You will be involved in helping to maintain our operational excellence by triaging, solving various inbound tickets related to issues across services billing maintains. As you grow within the team you will be given opportunities to own bigger initiatives and lead projects from start to finish solo or as part of a smaller team.

Our tech stack is a modern container-based microservice architecture. Technologies we use include Docker, Go (golang), PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, Kubernetes, Temporal and the usual Unix/Linux tools and workflows. We strive to build reliable, fault tolerant systems that can operate at Cloudflare's scale.

Desirable Skills And Knowledge

• BS+ in Computer Science or equivalent experience
• 7+ years professional experience as a developer/engineer
• Knowledge of Golang or desire to learn it
• Solid understanding of RESTful APIs and service security
• Working knowledge of SQL and relational databases such as PostgreSQL or MySQL
• Experience with modern Unix/Linux development and runtime environment
• Experience implementing secure and highly-available distributed systems/microservices
• Familiarity with event driven architecture
• Experience with API tooling and standards (Swagger/OpenAPI, OAuth/JWT)
• Strong interpersonal and communication skills with a bias towards action

This role may require flexibility to be on-call outside of standard working hours to address technical issues as needed.
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 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

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 or via mail at 101 Townsend St. San Francisco, CA 94107.