Principal Engineer - Cloudforce One

About the Role

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 APTs. As a Principal Engineer, you will act as an architect, threat analyst, and disruptor, rethinking how we detect, analyze, and neutralize threats across one of the world's largest networks.

This role operates across the full breadth of Cloudflare products, from redesigning detection pipelines in Kubernetes to deploying mitigation capabilities at the edge via Workers and building agentic AI workflows.

Responsibilities

• Drive architectural direction and technical strategy across Cloudforce One engineering.
• Identify and dismantle technical bottlenecks and architectural debt.
• Design and build critical data pipelines to analyze threat intelligence and abuse signals at scale.
• Serve as a technical force multiplier across concurrent projects, including threat intelligence platforms and abuse detection systems.
• Bring a threat-informed perspective to engineering decisions, staying ahead of evolving attack techniques.
• Collaborate with Threat Intelligence, Trust & Safety, Product, and Legal teams.
• Mentor engineering talent and set the bar for code quality and operational rigor.
• Champion agentic AI workflows to accelerate threat hunting and investigation.
• Participate in on-call rotations and incident response.

Requirements

• 15+ years of cybersecurity experience with an emphasis on adversarial trends and techniques.
• 10+ years of experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems.
• Deep proficiency in Go and/or TypeScript.
• Production experience with Kubernetes and edge computing platforms (e.g., Cloudflare Workers).
• Subject matter expertise in threat intelligence, the Cyber Kill Chain, and attacker infrastructure.
• Experience with data pipelines (Kafka, Temporal) and SQL databases (PostgreSQL).
• Strong architectural judgment and communication skills.

Bonus Points

• Experience in Trust & Safety, platform abuse, or malware analysis.
• Proficiency in YARA, Snort, or similar detection languages.
• Familiarity with Rust, Terraform, and React.
• Deep understanding of DNS, TLS/SSL, HTTP, and web security standards.