Principal Software 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. 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, Atlanta, Denver, Seattle, Washington D.C About the role We're seeking an exceptional Principal Engineer to join our newly formed Product Platform Task Force—a high-impact team that tackles critical infrastructure initiatives spanning our entire product suite and Cloudflare's massive edge network. What you'll do You'll partner with engineering leadership to identify, architect, and drive execution on complex technical projects that transcend individual team boundaries, from organization-wide authentication and authorization systems to ultra-distributed architectures that leverage Cloudflare's global edge infrastructure, performance optimizations, and shared services that enable multiple products. This role is perfect for a seasoned technical leader who excels at solving ambiguous, high-stakes problems with broad organizational impact, mentoring senior engineers, and establishing technical direction that influences the entire engineering organization. You'll have significant autonomy to shape our technical strategy while working collaboratively across product teams, platform engineers, and executive leadership to ensure our infrastructure scales efficiently and our engineering culture thrives. Responsibilities Define technical strategy and lead execution of high-impact, cross-cutting initiatives that benefit the entire engineering organization, such as service-to-service authentication systems, RBAC/authorization frameworks, ultra-distributed architectures leveraging Cloudflare's edge network, API layer improvements, observability infrastructure, and shared services that span our product portfolio. Architect and implement security-critical systems including authentication, authorization, and access control mechanisms that work seamlessly across our distributed infrastructure, ensuring both robust security postures and excellent developer experiences for teams building on these platforms. Design and build ultra-distributed systems that take full advantage of Cloudflare's massive global edge network, including edge computing with Workers and Durable Objects, ensuring our services deliver exceptional performance and reliability to users worldwide while managing the complexity of geo-distributed state and coordination. Set architectural standards and technical direction for our Product Platform stack—including Go services, Python pipelines, TypeScript edge computing (Cloudflare Workers/Durab