Vulnerability Defense Software Engineer, Cloudforce One

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. 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 Locations: Austin,TX and Washington, D.C. Role Summary Cloudforce One is Cloudflare’s threat operations and research team, responsible for identifying and disrupting cyber threats ranging from sophisticated cyber criminal activity to nation-state sponsored advanced persistent threats (APTs). Cloudforce One works in close partnership with external organizations and internal Cloudflare teams, continuously developing operational tradecraft and expanding ever-growing sources of threat intelligence to enable expedited threat hunting and remediation. Members of Cloudforce One are at the helm of leveraging an incredibly vast and varied set of data points that only one of the world’s largest global networks can provide. The team is able to analyze these unique data points, at massive scale and efficiency, synthesizing findings into actionable threat intelligence to better protect our customers. As a Software Engineer on this team, you build and evolve systems that help security practitioners assess technical risk, investigate complex systems, prioritize issues, and deliver actionable guidance to engineering teams. You will be responsible for translating complex security requirements and investigative methods into robust, scalable, and high-performance applications that have a direct impact on making the internet better, safer, and more powerful every day. Role Responsibilities While the majority of our services are now written in Go and TypeScript, you will also work with technologies such as Rust, Kafka, Redis, Kubernetes, Terraform, and PostgreSQL. We also pride ourselves in dogfooding our own products and services so you will be extensively working with Cloudflare’s developer platform as well. We are looking for great engineers regardless of experience with any of these specific technologies. Responsibilities include: • Design, build, run, and scale distributed tools and services that translate security tradecraft into scalable, evidence-based systems and workflows. • Partner with security practitioners to understand workflows, bottlenecks, and opportunities for automation. • Improve system design and architecture to ensure stability, performance, and maintainability of both internal and customer-facing services. • Analyze, communicate, and help prioritize complex technical concepts across teams. • Mentor and guide other developers in the team, helping to build collective technical expertise and promote best practices for writing well-tested, modular, and reusable code. This role may require flexibility to be on-call outside of standard working hours to address technical issues as needed. Desirable Skills and Experience • Working knowledge of cybersecurity concepts such as threat modeling, attack techniques, trust boundaries, exploitability, and defensive controls • Familiarity with incident response workflows, network containment, and remediation • Practical experience in vulnerability research/exploit development and translating findings into actionable mitigations • Experience with AI-assisted development and designing agentic AI workflows • At least 5 years of experience building large-scale software applications, preferably distributed systems • Experience designing and integrating RESTful APIs and/or gRPC services • Knowledge of SQL and common relational database systems such as PostgreSQL • Ability to independently define and deliver solutions in ambiguous problem spaces • Prior experience writing production-ready code in Go and/or TypeScript • Excellent debugging and optimization skills • Expertise in writing well-tested code • Interest in opportunities to be a technical mentor for teammates Bonus/Nice-to-Have Skills • Application security, security research, or security automation experience • Deep understanding of DNS, TLS/SSL and HTTP • Experience evaluating probabilistic systems Compensation Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location. • For Washington D.C. based hires: Estimated annual salary of $150,000 - $206,000 Equity This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan. Benefits Cloudflare offers a complete package of benefits and programs to support you and your family. Our benefits programs can help you pay health care expenses, support caregiving, build capital for the future and make life a little easier and fun! The below is a description of our benefits for employees in the United Sta