The Path Forward Returnship program at Cloudflare  is a 16- week paid returnship for experienced professionals returning to the workforce after taking time off for caregiving. The program is open to women and men who have at least 5 years of professional experience and have been out of the paid workforce for at least two years to focus on caring for a child or other dependent. If you meet these criteria, we welcome you to apply.  

At Cloudflare we are excited to be part of the Path Forward program because we appreciate the skills you can offer, the perspective you provide, and the contributions you will make. This program offers you a chance to revamp your skills, update your resume with new experience, and make connections with other women and men transitioning back to the workforce. It also offers support through Path Forward, a nonprofit organization on a mission to empower people who’ve been focused on caregiving transition back to the paid workforce.

About the department

Cloudflare's Infrastructure department builds the massive, geographically distributed infrastructure that handles tens of millions of requests per second across over 200 cities. The Infrastructure department contains four teams: Hardware Engineering, Datacenter Engineering, Datacenter Infrastructure & Growth, and Interconnection Strategy & Partnerships. The Hardware Engineering team is responsible for scoping, proving, and deploying new hardware technologies and systems to help Cloudflare scale and expand our edge computing platform efficiently and reliably. Our team is also responsible for validating ODM servers that meet the challenges of a massively growing infrastructure.

We pride ourselves on our work, and you can see some examples of what we have done recently on our blog: CPU benchmarks, CPU optimizations, L3 cache analysis, and hardware security

What you'll do

• Manage and track deliverables for cross-functional hardware projects covering a range of areas (e.g., network edge, core, and hardware, RMAs, internal testing lab, server and component samples)
• Work closely and cross functionally with other teams (e.g., supply chain, capacity planning, datacenter engineering, ODMs, SRE, software teams) to understand key deliverables, milestones and critical paths
• Develop program schedules to meet or exceed expectations and drive execution based on high level requirements and by building consensus across teams
• Develop and manage end-to-end project plans and ensure on-time delivery
• Identify necessary resources and plan to achieve successful delivery
• Track deliverables, engineering hardware samples/material, evaluate timelines and create mitigation plans with internal teams and vendors
• Manage and drive important vendor engagements and customer deliveries
• Drive internal workflow & process improvements for hardware teams (Hardware Engineering, Supply Chain, Hardware Acquisition, Performance, SRE)
• Collaborate with other TPMs on internal processes, tools and workflows across multiple teams and functions across Cloudflare

Examples of desirable skills, knowledge and experience

• 3+ years of experience in hardware development/product management/technical program management in a technical environment
• Experience building out programs globally and from the ground up
• Hands on technical experience driving solutions across various stakeholders
• Ability to understand technical details and make recommendations
• Foresight to understand and plan around the dependencies and impacts associated with other teams and projects
• Have an engineering background and/or mindset when solving problems
• Adept at strategy formulation and tactical execution
• Strong change management and communication skills
• Exceptional empathy and integrity. Demonstrated success in earning trust across a broad variety of stakeholders and making principled decisions
• Ability to influence and motivate people across a broad variety of job functions
• Experience in or desire to work with multiple time zones and multiple cross functional teams, including travel as needed
• Ability to effectively prioritize and advance a large number of projects simultaneously