SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Cloudflare's Packet Processing team is seeking a Systems Engineer to own and evolve Spectrum, a Layer 4 reverse proxy that handles arbitrary TCP and UDP traffic at massive scale across Cloudflare's global network. Spectrum powers DDoS mitigation, anycast performance, TLS termination, and global footprint for gaming servers, SSH, MQTT, custom protocols, and other non-HTTP applications.
In this role, you will take shared ownership of a critical, high-scale L4 proxy and help shape its evolution as a first-class part of Cloudflare's L3/L4 dataplane. You'll work on both the edge dataplane (Go-based TCP/UDP connection acceptance, forwarding, TLS termination, PROXY protocol, connection accounting, and eBPF integrations) and the control plane (application configuration APIs, provisioning, and global config distribution to every edge machine).
Key responsibilities include:
- Developing and maintaining the Spectrum edge dataplane and control plane in Go
- Integrating Spectrum with adjacent systems like Unimog (L4 load balancer), Magic Transit (IP transit), and Argo Smart Routing
- Driving operational excellence through analytics pipelines, observability, on-call support, and incident response
- Contributing to roadmap evolution and technical debt paydown in a product with significant production history
- Collaborating across Packet Processing, Traffic Management, DDoS, DNS, Core SRE, and Edge SRE teams
You should have experience building and shipping large-scale, reliable, highly distributed systems. Strong Go programming skills are essential; Rust experience is a plus. A solid understanding of L3/L4 networking, TCP/UDP protocols, and experience with high-performance systems, observability tools, and production incident response are highly valued. This is an opportunity to work on infrastructure that powers millions of websites and internet properties globally.
