Principal Systems Engineer - Internal GTM Tools

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, Texas

About the role

Created in January 2025, our centralized Developer Go-to-Market (GTM) organization functions as a "speedboat" to maintain focus, control direction, and iterate quickly. Our mission is to build long-term relationships with developers by addressing their unique needs and challenges with specialized attention and resources.

Our team operates across four core pillars: Marketing, Developer Relations, Growth Programs, and Sales. These functions work in close collaboration to support customers throughout their journey, from raising awareness and inspiring new use cases to driving platform adoption, consumption, and scaling customer relationships. Each function amplifies the impact of the others through strategic partnerships and shared insights.

What you'll do

You'll own the GTM-facing software and data products our sales motion runs on, end to end. That includes the data foundation underneath it and the signals that flag which accounts a rep should act on and when. You'll also lead our hardest cross-functional projects, the ones that span many teams and systems. You'll drive them to delivery, keep partner teams on track, and do it with a lot of autonomy.

Day to day you'll improve how we visualize pipeline, build sales tools that flag the right moment to reach out to a customer, and make the developer buying journey smoother. The work is a mix of data engineering, full-stack product, and applied AI, and you'll build it on Cloudflare's own developer platform.

This role fits someone who works well in a fast-paced, ambiguous environment, likes turning messy business problems into working software, and can juggle several priorities at once.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement features in a Golang, Typescript and SQL.
• Build and operate production services on Cloudflare Workers and Kubernetes.
• Own the data foundation including Query Engine, Workflows, MCP/APIs and other internal facing products and services.
• Own projects end to end; from design docs and schema changes through implementation, testing, deployment, and production monitoring.
• Participate in on call rotations, drive incident resolution, and write postmortems that improve reliability.
• Use AI tools extensively to accelerate development, debugging, and operational tasks. We expect engineers to leverage AI as a core part of their workflow.
• Collaborate across teams to coordinate capacity planning, API contracts, and cross cutting initiatives.
• Embed with Sales, Marketing, Developer Relations (DevRel), and Growth to turn fuzzy operational pain into shipped software.
• Help set the standard for GTM engineering organization wide.

Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience:

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with a demonstrated history of leading complex, organization-wide data initiatives.
• Deep expertise in building distributed systems and production infrastructure at scale, with proficiency in Go and strong working knowledge of TypeScript.
• Exceptional ability to navigate ambiguous problem spaces, identify the highest-impact technical work, and drive projects autonomously from conception through adoption—balancing pragmatic execution with long-term technical excellence.
• Deep analytical SQL and data modeling experience. Proven ability to manage complexity even at thousands of tables.
• Able to debug database and query performance issues using profiling tools and source code where applicable.
• Please be prepared to discuss specific examples of organization-wide technical initiatives you've led, particularly distributed systems or data infrastructure and their measurable business impact.

Nice to have:

• Previous experience as a Principal Engineer, Staff+ engineer, or technical leader on platform, infrastructure, or task force teams that operate outside traditional product roadmaps with a focus on enabling GTM organizations.
• Columnar/OLAP or lakehouse experience (ClickHouse, DuckDB, BigQuery, Snowflake, Iceberg, Starrocks).Familiarity with the Salesforce data model and CRM/API integrations.
• Familiarity with deploying to bare metal and Kubernetes.
• Experience on Cloudflare Workers / edge platforms and analytics-engineering (dbt) workflows.
• Background in SaaS or product-led growth (PLG) GTM motions.

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 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.