Systems Engineer - DDoS Protection
About Us
At Cloudflare, we have our eyes set on an ambitious goal: to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world’s largest networks that powers approximately 25 million 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!
About the team
The DDoS Protection team creates software that stops some of the largest DDoS attacks in the world. Our team is split evenly across Austin, TX USA and London, UK and you would be welcome in either location. Our software is written in Rust, Go, Python, and Lua. Our data pipeline uses Kafka, PostgreSQL and ClickHouse. Our software is run within Kubernetes or on Debian Linux. We monitor using Prometheus, Kibana, and Grafana.
Our mitigation system, called Gatebot, analyses the global HTTP request logs to build a picture of website traffic and identify HTTP floods. Once detected it emplaces rules that mitigate the impact of the HTTP flood.
It is a friendly team in an exciting and critical part of a global company. Your work will have real impact protecting Cloudflare infrastructure and customer websites across every vertical and country.
About the position
We are looking for engineers who have good knowledge of HTTP and some knowledge of TCP, UDP and TLS to help us protect websites from denial-of-service attacks. These attacks are usually volumetric and range from hundreds of HTTP requests per second to millions of HTTP requests per second.
The work will focus on these HTTP floods, to maintain and evolve the existing systems that protect against them and to contribute to shaping future systems.
As you will be working within an existing team your voice will be important and will be able to influence the direction of the engineering implementation and roadmap as the team defines the engineering roadmap by sharing knowledge, experience and ideas.
You are ideally self-motivated, creative, and take pride in shipping well-crafted, maintainable code.
Responsibilities
- Crafting software to improve our DDoS protections
- Participating in and leading projects as an engineer, that expand our DDoS protections
- Investigating attacks to see what we can learn and how we can make improvements
- Investigating attacks to provide customers and internal teams with insight about the attacks
- Monitoring and analysing logs and metrics to ensure system health
- Working on tooling and support around our software
- Communicating via internal and public channels about what we do, why, and how we do it
- Handle escalations from Support or SREs, which may include out of hour support in rare cases
Examples of desirable skills and experience:
We do not require you to have all of these and a degree is not required for this role.
- Experience with Rust, or Go
- Or similar and with a willingness to learn Rust and Go
- Experience with Python, or Lua
- Advanced knowledge of core protocols for the web (TCP/IP, HTTP, HTTP/2, TLS, QUIC)
- Awareness of regular expressions and differences between PCRE and RE2
- Awareness of Linux networking stack and iptables
- Experience debugging and testing your code, including avoiding false positives and running tests over sampled data
- Understanding of performance analysis
- Experience querying databases using SQL
- Awareness of common types of web application vulnerabilities
- Awareness of common web application software (Wordpress, Drupal, Magento, etc)
- Talent for discovering anomalies in data
- Ability to investigate and report the impact of security problems
- Ability to communicate complex security issues and ideas to all stakeholders
- Experience building and designing APIs
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: We equip politically and artistically important organizations and journalists 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: We created 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.
Path Forward Partnership: Since 2016, we have partnered with Path Forward, a nonprofit organization, to create 16-week positions for mid-career professionals who want to get back to the workplace after taking time off to care for a child, parent, or loved one.
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!
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 [email protected] or via mail at 101 Townsend St. San Francisco, CA 94107.
