Senior Systems Engineer, Identity & Access Management

About Us

Cloudflare is on a mission to help build a better Internet. 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 have web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with every request, resulting in 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. The company values builders who spot “normalized” problems and use AI-native curiosity to create solutions with the latest tools. Culture is built on iteration, leveraging AI to ship faster today to make it better tomorrow, while ensuring every improvement is shared across the team.

About the Role

Cloudflare runs one of the world's largest networks, and every API call that configures it starts by proving who is calling and what they're allowed to do. The IAM team owns the authentication and authorization systems behind that: the identity layer of the Control Plane operating at global scale. The surface spans login and SSO, OAuth and API tokens, account membership, roles and permissions, and SCIM provisioning. We're hiring a hands-on senior engineer to work on correctness-critical, high-throughput, highly resilient services.

Responsibilities

• Design and build high-throughput, low-latency IAM capabilities that power both customer-facing and internal service APIs.
• Contribute to the design and evolution of authentication and authorization systems into modern, distributed, and edge-capable architectures.
• Translate product and security requirements into robust, well-structured APIs and technical specifications in collaboration with Product, Security, and UX teams.
• Maintain a high bar through thorough code reviews, technical design documents, and collaborative problem-solving.
• Own the reliability of the platform under constant load, ensuring observability and resilience are built into every service.
• Use AI tools throughout your workflow, from code generation to debugging, and bring the judgment to know when to trust them.

Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience

• Professional Experience: 5–8 years building and operating production systems at scale.
• Identity Domain Knowledge: Working knowledge of identity protocols and models (OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML, SCIM, RBAC/ABAC, session management, etc.). Hands-on experience implementing identity protocols or fine-grained authorization systems in production.
• Language Proficiency: Proficiency in Go and TypeScript and comfort working across Cloudflare’s tech stack.
• API Design: Experience designing and building REST APIs: routing, authentication, request lifecycle, and versioning.
• Database & Storage: PostgreSQL and Redis experience: schema design, query optimization, caching strategies, and consistency tradeoffs.
• Distributed Systems: Strong distributed systems intuition: consistency models, event-driven replication, and implications of global state propagation.
• High Agency: High standards for correctness and security; curious, self-directed, and comfortable driving ambiguous problems to resolution across team boundaries.
• Bonus Points: Experience with credential and token lifecycle systems; familiarity with Cloudflare’s developer platform (Workers, Durable Objects, KV, R2); experience incrementally re-architecting a large, long-lived codebase under production traffic; familiarity with containerized deployment (Docker, Kubernetes), infrastructure as code (Terraform), and observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, Kibana).

What Makes Cloudflare Special

• Project Galileo: Since 2014, Cloudflare has 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, Cloudflare 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, Cloudflare has provided services to more than 425 local government election websites in 33 states.
• 1.1.1.1: Cloudflare 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 and is the first consumer-focused service Cloudflare has ever released. Cloudflare does not store client IP addresses and will continue to abide by its privacy commitment to ensure no user data is sold to advertisers or used to target consumers.