Available Locations: Remote US or Lisbon or Remote Portugal, London or Remote UK, Amsterdam or Remote Netherlands, Munich or Remote Germany
About the Department
Cloudflare Research is involved with building the future of Cloudflare by tackling strategic projects that have a large impact on Cloudflare systems and the Internet at large. Team members independently drive greenfield projects, work closely with Cloudflare product and engineering teams on shared objectives, and build strong collaborations with both external organizations and other organizations within Cloudflare to achieve common goals.
Cloudflare Research embarks upon projects that help shape the future of the Internet at large, and the systems that drive it. We design, develop, and deploy these projects into Cloudflare systems to demonstrate their impact, and to share that knowledge with the wider standards and research communities -- often in collaboration with university or other industry labs. A sample of our recent high-profile works include Constellation AI, Encrypted Client Hello (ECH), Post Quantum Encryption, CAP, ZKP for browsers, and Addressing Agility. Our current research directions include applied cryptography, privacy, network protocols, network architecture, network performance, AI and ML and distributed systems.
More information about Cloudflare's approach to research can be found here.
About the Role
The Researcher Director will manage the Research Team to investigate new ideas, build new technologies, inform and execute measurement practices, and dive into existing codebases to make meaningful changes in production environments. Prioritization and planning are key elements as the nature of the team’s research necessarily shifts between putting ideas into practice and onto paper, while ensuring rigorous evaluations of performance, correctness, or impact. The successful candidate will have a proven track record of success driving streams of investigation to completion.
General Requirements
- Experience managing R&D teams and managers
- Proficiency in software development
- Must have a proven record of peer-reviewed research, standards, or equivalent in venues held by but not limited to ACM, USENIX, or IEEE.
- Solid foundation in computer science, with an understanding of one or more Cloudflare-relevant areas such as privacy, networking, distributed systems, storage, operating systems, formal methods or machine learning for systems.
- Excel at planning, working independently and multi-functionally, leading execution across teams to meet commitments, and deliver with predictability
- Demonstrate a track record of strong communication and technical influence. You’re as good as explaining “why” as you are “how.”
- Experience implementing tools, processes, internal instrumentation, methodologies, and resolving blockages
- Comfortable working on teams/projects with tight deadlines and short release cycles
Bonus Points
- Have completed a PhD or equivalent graduate research program in Computer Science, Mathematics, or related STEM field
- Strong ties to and participation in standards bodies such as IETF, W3C, and others.
- Proficiency in one or more the following languages - Go, Rust, Typescript, C, C++ and/or Lua
- Familiarity with Kafka, Postgres, ClickHouse, Kubernetes, Prometheus, and tools such as Cloudflare’s Workers platform
- Demonstrated excellence in broad-audience technical communication (e.g. highly cited blogs, textbooks)
- Strong connections with the broader scientific community (arXiv presence, program committees, etc.)
