Senior Software Engineer, Agentic Discovery

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.

Available Locations: Lisbon, or London (Hybrid)

About the Role

Emerging Technologies & Incubation (ETI) is where new and bold products are built and released within Cloudflare. Leveraging Cloudflare’s global edge and network, our team builds the products enabling the next era of the Internet: making domains Readable, Discoverable, and Callable for autonomous AI agents. As AI agents change how humans and machines find, evaluate, and act on information, we build capabilities that enable website owners to prepare their sites for agent interaction, test how agents read content, establish open interaction standards (like WebMCP and MCP), and open entirely new channels to reach agentic audiences. We are a cross-functional group that communicates regularly, supports one another, and holds our work to a high standard.

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to serve as a technical anchor and subject matter expert on our Agentic Discovery team. In this role, you will define the architecture, core protocols, and multi-team standards powering the next generation of agent-web interactions. As a senior technical leader, you will shape product roadmaps, mentor engineers across Cloudflare, and write technical specifications that drive execution across multiple teams. You will drive engineering excellence across edge infrastructure, data pipelines, protocol layers, and developer tooling, ensuring systems are resilient and complexity is reduced for your peers.

Responsibilities

Architect and Ship Core Systems: Build high-throughput, resilient production services that make web properties Readable (structured content transformation), Discoverable (indexing and AEO), and Callable (WebMCP, tool-calling APIs, Generative UI) for autonomous agents.

Define Emerging Agent Protocols: Lead integrations and protocol standards (MCP, MCP Apps, UCP, MPP, WebMCP). Author architectural specifications and technical designs that guide engineering work within and outside the ETI team.

Product & Stakeholder Collaboration: Partner directly with Product Management, customers, and key stakeholders to translate customer needs into technical requirements, clarify KPIs, and shape engineering roadmaps.

System Health & Observability: Drive continuous improvements in system health. Lead complex incident responses, conduct thorough post-incident retrospectives, and rearchitect systems to eliminate recurring failure modes and minimize customer escalations.

Engineering Leadership & Governance: Elevate engineering standards across Cloudflare through technical mentorship, code reviews, architectural governance, and candidate evaluation for engineering hiring.

Desired Skills, Knowledge, and Experience

Distributed Systems & Architecture: Demonstrated experience designing scalable system architecture and setting performance metrics in a distributed, high-scale environment.

Technical Leadership & Specification: Track record of writing clear, comprehensive technical specifications and leading cross-functional engineering initiatives to completion.

Web & Network Fundamentals: Deep understanding of HTTP, APIs, proxies, caching, web security, and performance bottlenecks spanning multi-service architectures.

AI & Agent Ecosystems: Hands-on experience and a deep conceptual understanding of AI agents, tool calling, Model Context Protocol (MCP), or agent harnesses.

Ambiguity & Iterative Delivery: Proven ability to partner with product managers and customers to navigate ambiguous problem spaces and iteratively deliver large-scale architecture.

Mentorship & Operational Excellence: Experience mentoring junior and mid-level engineers, contributing to hiring, and driving improvements to engineering processes and incident response workflows.

Bonus Points

Modern Edge & Runtime Expertise: Fluency in async Rust or TypeScript/JavaScript edge runtimes (e.g., Cloudflare Workers) at scale.

Open Source & Protocol Contributions: Active contributions to or leadership in open-source agent frameworks, protocols (e.g., MCP), web standards bodies, browser engines, or network proxies.

Incident Resolution Track Record: Demonstrated experience resolving complex, multi-team production incidents and driving post-mortem recommendations to completion.

Search, Crawling & RAG: Background in search engines, Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), web crawling at scale, or RAG platform engineering.

Security & Cryptography: Expertise in cryptographic protocols (public-key encryption, digital signatures) or privacy-preserving web architectures.

Compensation

Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.

● For Portugal based hires: Estimated annual salary is between €66,000 - €91,000.

The final offer will be inclusive of time exemption, in alignment with the applicable law and collective bargaining agreements.

Equity

This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan.

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 the interview process may be asked to attend an in-person interview within one of the Cloudflare Offices or Cloudflare Hubs. More details about this will be available at that stage of the interview process.

This position may require access to information protected under U.S. export control laws, including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations. Please note that any offer of employment may be conditioned on your authorization to receive software or technology controlled under these U.S. export laws without sponsorship for an export license.

Cloudflare is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunity for all people and place great value in both diversity and inclusiveness. All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to their, or any other person's, perceived or actual race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, family care status, or any other basis protected by law. We are an AA/Veterans/Disabled Employer.

Cloudflare provides reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities. Please tell us if you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job. Examples of reasonable accommodations include, but are not limited to, changing the application process, providing documents in an alternate format, using a sign language interpreter, or using specialized equipment. If you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job, please contact us via e-mail at [email protected] or via mail at 101 Townsend St. San Francisco, CA 94107.