Systems Engineer, Product Platform Tools

About the Role

The Product Platform Tools team builds and operates Cloudflare's internal support and admin platform, which customer-facing and operational teams across the company use to do their jobs. It includes the API gateway and authorization layer that control access to those teams' internal applications.

We're hiring a hands-on backend engineer to build and evolve the services, APIs, and gateway for the platform. You'll set a high standard for how applications onboard onto the platform, taking an API-driven approach to contracts, access, and integration. You'll work with the engineering teams who onboard their apps and with the non-engineering teams who use the platform daily. You'll need curiosity about how Cloudflare works under the hood, a security-first mindset, and the communication skills to turn operational needs into reliable platform capabilities.

Responsibilities

• API and gateway development: design and build the backend services, APIs, and gateway capabilities (routing, authentication, request handling, upstream integration) at the core of the internal admin platform.
• API-driven onboarding: set and raise the standard for onboarding applications onto the platform. Use clear API contracts, well-governed access, and a repeatable integration path so teams can onboard quickly and consistently.
• Stakeholder partnership: work directly with Support, Legal, and Security to turn operational needs into maintainable platform features.
• Security and authorization: own the platform's authorization model. Work with Security and Legal to implement and enforce access control, governance, and compliance requirements in code.
• Reliability of what you build: build observability and resilience into your services, take part in on-call for them, respond to incidents, and lead post-incident reviews.
• Engineering excellence: ramp quickly into unfamiliar and legacy codebases and make incremental improvements that reduce toil. Keep a high bar through code review and design docs.
• AI-assisted engineering: use AI coding tools as a normal part of how you design, build, and debug. Review their output with the same rigor you'd apply to any other code.

Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience

These are examples of what a strong candidate brings:

Must-Have Skills

• Professional experience: 5+ years building and operating production backend services at scale.
• Languages: strong proficiency in Go and/or TypeScript.
• API gateway and API design: hands-on experience building or operating an API gateway or similar edge/proxy layer, and designing REST APIs. This covers routing, request lifecycle, authentication, and versioning.
• Authentication and authorization: strong understanding of OAuth 2.0, OIDC, JWT, RBAC, and policy-based access (such as OPA/Rego), with a security-first approach to design.
• Data: hands-on experience with PostgreSQL and Redis, including schema design, query optimization, and caching strategies.
• Cross-team collaboration: comfortable working with engineering, Security, Legal, and non-technical stakeholders, and explaining technical detail to each.
• Ownership and autonomy: confident in legacy code, self-directed, and able to drive ambiguous problems to resolution across team boundaries.

Nice-to-Have Skills

• Experience building internal tooling, admin consoles, or case-management systems for non-engineering users.
• Exposure to security governance or compliance workflows, or working closely with a dedicated Security or Legal team on access control.
• Familiarity with Cloudflare's platform (Workers, Access, Zero Trust, Gateway).
• Experience running containerized services (Docker, Kubernetes), infrastructure as code (Terraform), and CI/CD with GitLab.
• Observability experience: distributed tracing, structured logging, and dashboards (Grafana, Kibana, Jaeger).