The role
From Cloudflare's own posting.
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.
About the Role
Cloudflare's Internal Fraud Platform team is focused on protecting Cloudflare from fraud and abuse: fraudulent signups, promo and trial abuse, payment fraud, chargebacks, and account takeover that cost the company revenue and support overhead. Today the team is built around data science, developing the signals and models that detect this activity. We're hiring our first software engineer to build the platform around that work: ingesting events from the internal systems where fraud shows up (billing, signup, support), evaluating and routing them, and getting decisions and case data in front of the people who act on them.
As the founding engineer on this team, you'll be the connective tissue between Cloudflare's internal systems and our fraud detection capabilities. You'll instrument the systems that generate fraud signals, build the pipelines and services that deliver those signals for evaluation, and create the tools our analysts use to investigate and resolve cases. You'll partner closely with data scientists to take models and heuristics from notebook to production, and have meaningful influence over the architecture, tooling, and engineering practices it's built on.
Responsibilities
Build the Platform: Design, build, and operate the services and pipelines that ingest fraud-relevant events from internal systems (billing, signup, support, and others), evaluate them, and route decisions and case data to the right destinations.
Deliver Signals for Scoring: Partner with the team's Data Scientists and Machine Learning Engineer to expose the event data and contextual features their models need, and integrate model decisions back into the pipelines and tools that act on them.
Build Investigation Tooling: Create the internal tools and workflows that let Trust & Safety, Support, and Finance analysts investigate flagged accounts and events and take action.
Own Projects End to End: Drive initiatives from problem definition through design, implementation, rollout, and operation with minimal oversight. In many ways this is a 0-to-1 team, and you'll be expected to fill in the gaps.
Ensure Accuracy and Reliability: Build fault-tolerant systems that handle retries, failures, and high event volumes without silently dropping or duplicating fraud signals, and maintain the operational health of what you ship, including addressing the root cause of recurring issues.
Shape Technical Direction: As one of the team's first engineers, help establish the architecture patterns, tooling choices, and engineering standards that will scale as the team grows.
Collaborate Cross-Functionally: Work with Trust & Safety, Data Science, Billing/Fintech, Support, and Product teams to understand fraud vectors and turn them into engineering requirements.
Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience
Five or more years of professional software engineering experience, or equivalent practical experience.
Experience building and operating distributed systems or backend services in production.
Experience designing and building data or event pipelines (e.g., Kafka, Pub/Sub, or similar).
Strong understanding of RESTful APIs, service security, and API standards such as OpenAPI, OAuth, or JWT.
Working knowledge of SQL, data modeling, and relational databases such as PostgreSQL or MySQL.
Comfort owning ambiguous, 0-to-1 problems with limited existing infrastructure or precedent.
Strong troubleshooting, cross-functional communication, and project ownership skills.
Bonus Points
Experience in fraud, risk, trust & safety, or payments engineering.
Familiarity with ML serving and feature engineering concepts
Experience with billing, subscriptions, or other financial/transactional systems.
Experience building internal tools or dashboards for non-engineering stakeholders (analysts, support, finance).
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