What you'll do
Acting as a primary technical anchor for network defense, you will provide advanced assistance and strategic intelligence across Cloudflare’s most sophisticated customer environments. This involves deep mastery of infrastructure protection components (spanning Cloudflare’s native services or industry-equivalent solutions), including BGP routing and advertisement control (managing prefix advertisement and de-advertisement), network protection like Magic Transit, IPFLOW-based Magic Network Monitoring, Advanced TCP/UDP protection, DDoS mitigation rulesets, firewall configurations, Layer 4 proxies such as Spectrum, DNS Firewall, and connectivity troubleshooting over GRE, IPsec, and CNI. A working knowledge of application security (including CDN technology and Web Application Firewalls) will allow you to extend support across broader Managed Defense activities.
The role focuses on:
Technical Mentorship: Elevating the team’s collective skill set by acting as a "player-coach" providing hands-on technical guidance during live incidents and reviewing complex mitigation strategies.
Deep-Dive Investigation & Mitigation: Analyzing infrastructure threats using advanced internal telemetry to engineer informed mitigation strategies—specifically focusing on DDoS vectors, BGP routing anomalies, and GRE encapsulation issues—implementing defenses directly on the edge for mission-critical traffic.
Detection Engineering & Tuning: Continuously designing and refining detection mechanisms, security controls, and alerting thresholds to ensure highly accurate, rapid identification of sophisticated network attacks with minimal false positives.
Infrastructure & Tooling Evolution (AI-Driven): Partnering closely with Product, Engineering, and AI teams to transform real-world DDoS attack data into AI-powered automated network defenses, dynamic mitigation models, and enhanced platform capabilities.
Strategic Technical Communication: Serving as an authoritative technical voice during active volumetric attacks, providing clarity and architectural routing guidance to both internal stakeholders and external customer engineering teams.
The ideal candidate moves beyond following static runbooks to engineering AI-assisted response workflows, transforming raw network flow telemetry into actionable mitigation strategies, tuned detections, and intelligent, automated edge defenses.
Responsibilities
Technical Escalation & Response: Acting as a subject matter expert for the Managed Defense Center during complex network security incidents, providing hands-on intervention for large-scale volumetric and protocol-based DDoS attacks when standard protocols are exceeded.
Incident Architecture: Leading the technical response to sophisticated infrastructure threats, validating the efficacy of network mitigation rules, and ensuring stable, clean traffic delivery via BGP and GRE mechanisms.
Detection Engineering: Designing, deploying, and tuning network attack detection logic, utilizing attack telemetry to stay consistently ahead of evolving DDoS methodologies and adversary tactics.
Technical Communications: Driving high-touch technical dialogue with customer network teams during critical incidents, translating complex routing and attack flow data into actionable architectural advice.
Operational Engineering & AI Integration: Designing and refining technical Managed Defense workflows, building AI-driven automated troubleshooting playbooks (particularly around BGP/GRE), and tuning alerting thresholds to create self-healing infrastructure responses.
Forensics & Analysis: Utilizing internal telemetry, flow data, and specialized monitoring tools to perform deep-dive forensics on novel network attack vectors.
Technical Coaching: Mentoring the Managed Defense team on advanced traffic analysis and security best practices, ensuring a high technical bar across the Managed Defense Center.
Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience:
Experience : A minimum of 8+ years of relevant hands-on experience specifically within the DDoS mitigation industry, Network Security Operations, or a highly technical infrastructure incident response environment.
Protocol Sovereignty: A profound understanding of internet routing and encapsulation protocols. Expert-level knowledge of BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) and GRE (Generic Routing Encapsulation) reinjection, along with a deep ability to deconstruct TCP/IP, UDP, and ICMP traffic flows.
Security Mastery: Proven ability to identify common network attacks and design robust mitigation strategies for complex volumetric DDoS, UDP/TCP based, and protocol exhaustion using edge-based security controls.
Detection & Tuning: Demonstrated expertise in detection engineering, including the continuous tuning of network security rules and alerts to optimize defense efficacy and operational signal-to-noise ratios.
AI Tooling & Automation: Proficiency in Python, Go, or Bash to automate network security workflows, with demonstrated experience leveraging AI/ML models or LLM APIs to build automated troubleshooting diagnostics and dynamic threat mitigations.
System Literacy: Experience with monitoring platforms (e.g., Prometheus/Grafana) and querying large network datasets to operationalize contextual routing and security data.
Certifications: Advanced networking and network security credentials such as Cisco CCNP, CCNP Security, or CCIE are highly valued.
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 laws without sponsorship for an export license.
Cloudflare is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunity for all people and place great value in both diversity and inclusiveness. All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to their, or any other person's, perceived or actual race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, family care status, or any other basis protected by law. We are an AA/Veterans/Disabled Employer.
Cloudflare provides reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities. Please tell us if you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job. Examples of reasonable accommodations include, but are not limited to, changing the application process, providing documents in an alternate format, using a sign language interpreter, or using specialized equipment. If you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job, please contact us via e-mail at hr@cloudflare.com or via mail at 101 Townsend St. San Francisco, CA 94107.