Principal Systems Engineer

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: Bengaluru Role Summary We're looking for experienced engineers to help us build the next-generation proxy that powers a quarter of the Internet's traffic. This role is for those who bring deep expertise in HTTP, transport protocols, or congestion control, and are excited to apply that knowledge to one of the most technically challenging infrastructure projects in the industry. This is your opportunity to lead technical direction in a team that doesn't just use protocols — we help define them, working closely with the IETF and open-source communities on QUIC, MASQUE, and emerging standards like ECH. Role Responsibilities Design and build our next-gen Rust-based proxy architecture Lead improvements in performance, reliability, and observability at global scale Bring expertise in congestion control, transport behavior, or HTTP internals to influence product and architectural decisions Shape protocol evolution and represent Cloudflare in the standards community Mentor engineers and help grow deep protocol expertise across the team Role Requirements (Must-Have Skills) Proven strong ability and experience in systems or network programming (Rust, C, etc.) Knowledge of web server implementations (such as NGINX) Deep understanding of HTTP/2, HTTP/3, QUIC, congestion control, or transport-layer protocols Proven ability to scale systems under high throughput and low latency demands Experience driving architecture or protocol-level change in production systems Bonus: contributions to open standards or open source projects Nice-to-Have Skills Cryptography experience

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.