Software Engineer, Spectrum

About the role As a member of Spectrum in the Packet Processing team, we're looking for a Systems Engineer who wants to take shared ownership of a critical, high-scale L4 proxy and help evolve it into the next generation of Cloudflare's non-HTTP traffic platform. This is a rare opportunity to work on a product with massive existing scale while helping shape where it goes next as a first-class part of our L3/L4 dataplane story. Responsibilities Some of the things you'll work on: The Spectrum edge dataplane (Go): TCP/UDP connection acceptance and forwarding, TLS termination, PROXY protocol, connection accounting, and eBPF integrations The Spectrum control plane (Go): application configuration APIs, provisioning, and the systems that push config globally to every edge machine Cross-dataplane integrations : how Spectrum fits together with Unimog for L4 load balancing, with Magic Transit for IP transit, with Argo Smart Routing for accelerated origin paths, etc Operational excellence : analytics pipelines, observability, on-call, incident response, and paying down technical debt in a product with a long production history Roadmap evolution : help shape where Spectrum goes next as the L4 counterpart to our HTTP proxy stack You'll partner closely with the rest of Packet Processing, other Traffic Management teams, DDoS, DNS, Core SRE, and Edge SRE to solve problems that span the entire Cloudflare stack. Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience Experience building and shipping large-scale, reliable, highly distributed systems Strong programming experience in Go ; familiarity with or willingness to work in Rust is a plus Solid understanding of L3 and L4 networking : TCP, UDP, IP, connection state, NAT, anycast, and packet flows Experience with Linux networking primitives — sockets, eBPF, network namespaces, netfilter/nftables, tc Experience designing and integrating RESTful APIs and backend systems Comfort with operating what you build in production — on-call rotations, incident response, and root-cause analysis Ability to reason about existing systems at scale : reading unfamiliar code, understanding hidden dependencies, and safely evolving software that has been in production for years Excellent debugging and optimization skills, particularly around performance and connection lifecycle issues Focus on clarity in written and verbal communication; ability to work across teams to land shared solutions Bonus Points Experience with TLS termination , PROXY protocol, or L4/L7 proxies (Envoy, HAProxy, nginx stream, etc.) Experience with ClickHouse , Kafka, or large-scale connection/flow analytics pipelines Experience with globally-distributed KV or config-push systems Prior work on DDoS mitigation, anycast routing, L4 load balancing, or high-throughput edge network daemons Contributions to open-source networking or proxy projects Compensation Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location. 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 States, and benefits may vary for employees based outside the U.S. Health & Welfare Benefits Medical/Rx Insurance Dental Insurance Vision Insurance Flexible Spending Accounts Commuter Spending Accounts Fertility & Family Forming Benefits On-demand mental health support and Employee Assistance Program Global Travel Medical Insurance Financial Benefits Short and Long Term Disability Insurance Life & Accident Insurance 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan Employee Stock Participation Plan Time Off Flexible paid time off covering vacation and sick leave Leave programs, including parental, pregnancy health, medical, and bereavement leave What Makes Cloudflare Special? We’re not just a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company. We’re a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company with a soul. Fundamental to our mission to help build a better Internet is protecting the free and open Internet. Project Galileo : Since 2014, we've 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, we 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, we've provided services to more than 425 local government election websites in 33 states. 1.1.1.1 : We 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 - it is the first consumer-focused service Cloudflare has ever released. Here’s the deal - we don’t store client IP addresses never, ever. We will continue to abide by our privacy commitment and ensure that no user data is sold to advertisers or used to target consumers. Sound like something you’d like to be a part of? We’d love to hear from you! Please note that applicants who progress to the offer stage of the interview process may be asked to attend an in-person interview within one of the Cloudflare Offices or Cloudflare Hubs. More details about this will be available at that stage of the interview process. This position may require access to information protected under U.S. export control laws, including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations. Please note that any offer of employment may be conditioned on your authorization to receive software or technology controlled under these U.S. export