It's the end of the year, so we thought it would be a great time to give you an update on how we're doing and what we're planning for 2021. If you're reading this, you know we like to share everything we do at Cloudflare, including how the organization is evolving.
In July, John Graham-Cumming wrote a blog post entitled Cloudflare's first year in Lisbon. and showed how we went from an announcement, just a few months before, to an entirely bootstrapped and fully functional office. At the time, despite a ramping pandemic, the team was already hard at work doing a fantastic job scaling up and solidifying our presence here.
A few weeks later, in August, I proudly joined the team.
The first weeks
Cloudflare is, by any standard, a big company. There's a lot you need to learn, many people you need to get to know first, and a lot of setup steps you need to get through before you're in a position to do actual real productive work.
Joining the company during COVID was challenging. I felt just as excited as I was scared. We were (and still are) fully working from home, I didn't have a team to work with in person. A setup like this surely looks daunting, even for experienced people.
But here's the thing. Cloudflare isn’t just any company. We're unparalleled because we masterfully combine scale, ambition, talent, product, vision, values, and culture in a way that's very difficult to replicate and maintain at any other company.
We're big, but we move fast. We're over 1,600 working together, but it feels like a cohesive group. We're distributed across multiple offices and continents, often working in teams with members from different time zones, but we don't notice it. We have tools, documentation, and methodologies, but they don't get in the way of our “shipping products'' mantra. There are product owners, teams for specific features, but we all hold ownership for everyone's work.
I felt all of this right after my orientation week. The warm welcome, the regular check-ins to say hello and see how I was doing, and everyone's urge to make sure I was adjusting and getting all the help I needed, giving me advice, introducing me to other colleagues. Cloudflarians take genuine pride in making sure everyone feels at home. You can learn more about this experience from a Story Time segment John did with me.
Where do we stand
Cloudflare Lisbon has come a long way. We now have 74 incredibly talented people working or joining in areas such as Engineering, Security, Infrastructure, Customer Support, People, Places, Product Management, Emerging Technologies or Accounting, and growing fast.
Although the pandemic didn't help our plans, especially those related to growing and physically working in our brand new office on Praça Marquês de Pombal, it didn't slow us down either. November and December alone, 15 people joined the team. We're gaining momentum.
More interestingly, we have a super diverse team in Lisbon, and we couldn't be prouder of it. We're putting action ahead of words and actively contributing to create more opportunities for women in technology and to attract people to work in Portugal regardless of their country of origin.
Our discussions on whether "Pastéis de Nata" is best served with or without cinnamon, our holiday traditions, Portuguese music, coffee, our frequent virtual Pub Quizzes, escape room events, and of course, the comments on shirtless Marcelo are now routine. They are evidence that we feel like a group working together, having fun while growing.
Returning to Portugal?
We live in unusual and contemplative times. Many of our emigrants living outside the country are considering returning home to Portugal and our office in Lisbon is proof of this growing movement. Portuguese returnees represent roughly 10% of our team.
The Portuguese Government has an initiative called "Programa Regressar," where they provide tax benefits and financial assistance to support emigrants and their families returning to Portugal.
While this is great, we think it's not enough. Moving you and your family to another country is a life-changing event. Although things like patriotism, cost of living, and tax incentives play an essential role in the personal decision process, skilled and talented people will also be looking for a great workplace and a meaningful, ambitious company to join.
This is where Cloudflare can help you. We can provide you the best of the two worlds. Living in a beautiful country, your home, while working in a world-class company, solving big problems at scale on a mission to help build a better Internet with a unique culture. Furthermore, we support your return, and we're ready to help you in any way we can.
The future
Cloudflare is serious about its presence in Portugal. We're going to continue growing and investing in highly skilled talent for our Lisbon office and making it one of Cloudflare's top locations, alongside San Francisco, Austin, Singapore, and London.
Currently, we have 28 open positions in Lisbon, and you can expect new ones to open over the upcoming weeks. Some are for teams based in Lisbon, like Data Insights and Cloudflare Radar (we're doubling in 2021), while others will join different projects, some of which have teams distributed across multiple offices.
If you decide to apply, there are many resources you can use to learn about Cloudflare and improve your chances of snatching your dream job. Here are a few:
Cloudflare Careers Day: Meet the Engineering Team with Isabel Rodrigues, Jen Langdon, and me.
Our Blog. We share an unusual amount of information about our infrastructure and products, our technical decisions, architecture, and our approach to solving complex, large-scale technical challenges.
Our Official GitHub Page. We have open-source encoded all over in our DNA, and we like to give back to the community whenever possible. Cloudflare has over 300 public projects that you can explore, try them yourself, or fork.
Our Developers Website, where you can learn about our products, the way they work, their features, and APIs. Speaking of APIs, take a look at cloudflare-go and flarectl.
Check our community Forum, ask us questions; we're always there for you, you'll be surprised. Follow us on Twitter.
Cloudflare TV airs excellent content all the time. You can check our schedule for numerous live segments with the team and guests or re-run past segments. We also have a "Best of" archive.
Finally, you can try our products. As part of our mission and values, we offer very generous free tiers to individual users and small startups. You can try our CDN features, DDoS, Workers (100,000 requests per day, with Workers KV included), and even Access for Teams (with Argo tunnel included, for companies or households under 50 seats), at no cost.
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. Cloudflare powers Internet requests for ~16% of the Fortune 1,000 and serves 20 million HTTP requests per second on average.