If you're thinking about joining a startup as an engineer we'd like you to think of CloudFlare. The two most important reasons to think of CloudFlare are... because of who your colleagues would be and who our customers are (and who their customers are).
It's the people, inside and outside the company, that make CloudFlare a fascinating and stimulating place to work.
The Team
One of the most enjoyable things about working at CloudFlare is being challenged intellectually by your colleagues. We have a very smart team of people working with the latest technologies. We've made a large investment in the Go and Lua languages and hired people who are experts in both. We make extensive use of C and PHP. We know a lot about JavaScript and how it is used in the real world. We use and contribute to many open source projects.
Core to making CloudFlare work is rolling out features without eating up CPU or memory. That means optimizing everything so that we get the most out of our custom hardware. That requires engineers who like to get under the hood of the tools they are working with. We look for people with deep knowledge of their speciality and we hire them. If you know a lot about any of our technologies we'd like to talk to you.
Daily life at CloudFlare means working with people who know an enormous amount about different web and server technologies and who are happy to share their knowledge. We regularly speak at meetups, conferences and internal 'lunch and learn' meetings.
Hiring the smartest people means we have a wide range of ages and backgrounds: you'll meet people just a couple of years out of college and those for whom college is a distant memory; you'll meet people from all over the world. We also love to hire people who've worked on open source projects.
The Reach
CloudFlare's customers are web site owners. And there are a lot of them. We currently handle about 5% of the Internet's web traffic and have major customers like imgur, Eurovision and MIT, and smaller customers like The Pumpkin Lady. Both the traffic we handle and our customer base are growing very rapidly.
Code you write will be used in one of the most dynamic environments possible and by a huge number of people. If there are bugs, they will be found! Roughly 750 million unique IP addresses touch our global network every month generating around 250 billion page views. We handle more traffic than Yahoo, Amazon, Instagram, eBay, AOL, Apple... combined. The code you write here makes a difference to our legion of web site owners and their customers.
Whether you are writing code to make DNS faster, change the way Internet compression is done, optimize the mobile experience, protect sites against hacker attacks, provide the fastest and most secure SSL service, rollout new protocols like SPDY or IPv6, or make our service the easiest to use both through the web or through an API, your code will have a huge impact.
The breadth of CloudFlare's customer base and visitor base means that we see all the world's networks, every web browser imaginable, all manner of attacks, and work with customers using every sort of web server. And with variety and reach come scale and scaling problems; as one small example of our scaling challenges: we generate around 60GB of log files per minute.
Talk to us
Interested in making the web faster, safer and easier for web site owners? Take a look at who we are looking for in San Francisco and London.