We view internships as a vital pipeline for talent and a source of new energy and ideas. The number of our intern goal, a nod to our 1.1.1.1 public DNS resolver, is intentional. It represents our deep technical roots and our focus on building foundational infrastructure for the Internet. Now, we stand at the cusp of a new technological revolution: the age of AI.

To win in this new era, we can’t just rely on established methods. We need new ways of thinking, unconstrained by the "way things have always been done." That’s why this significantly increased class of interns will have a special focus: to ramp up the creative and widespread application of AI with a fresh approach.

We want this group to challenge our assumptions. They will be tasked with looking at our customers’ needs, our products and features, our network, and our operations to find novel ways to utilize AI. How can AI make our network even smarter? How can it help our customers be more secure and efficient? How can it transform our own business processes? We believe that by empowering a large, diverse cohort of bright minds who have grown up as digital and now AI natives, we will unlock innovations we haven’t even imagined yet.

Like you, we have seen numerous reports that more and more firms are capping their total headcount in favor of leaning on more AI tools, leading to downsizing their intern and new-graduate hiring. This is resulting in increased sidelining of new college graduates. But we think this misreads the moment completely, so we’re heading in the opposite direction. 

While we are excited about what AI tools can help do, we have a different philosophy about their role. AI tools make great team members even better, and allow firms to set more ambitious goals. They are not replacements for new hires — but ways to multiply how new hires can contribute to a team.

The next phase of Cloudflare’s success will be driven by considerable change in almost everything we do. And although we have an amazing team, we are humble enough to realize that we don’t possess everything we need to envision and implement that radical change. We need the innovation and fresh approach of a talented new generation of leaders. And we can’t press “pause” on bringing aboard that talent. 

This isn’t the first time we’ve made a counter-cultural commitment to interns. Back in the 2020, as the world faced unprecedented uncertainty, many companies made the difficult decision to scale back or cancel their internship programs. We went in the opposite direction. Believing that investing in talent was more critical than ever, we doubled the size of our intern class. We knew that these students represented the future, and abandoning them was not an option. That decision reinforced our culture of long-term thinking and our responsibility to foster emerging talent, especially during the toughest of times. And we’ve benefitted from it — some of our most promising young employees emerged from this batch.

Interns at Cloudflare do real, meaningful work — they ship. They join active teams, and are expected to contribute to the problems that we solve everyday. Our interns don’t merely get a feel for the place and fetch coffee. This isn’t a “test drive.” We want every member of our intern program to take ownership of and conclude their time being able to point to a concrete deliverable that solved a real customer or internal problem at Cloudflare. 

From day one, interns are embedded in teams across the company — from engineering and product to marketing, legal, and finance. They work alongside seasoned experts on critical projects, contributing code that ships to millions, launching marketing campaigns, and helping to shape the policies that govern the Internet. Our goal is not just to provide an internship experience; it's to provide the foundation for a career. We are committed to training the people who will one day lead our company, our industry, and the future of the Internet.

The challenges we address will vary by intern and by team. You can review examples of intern projects from last year in this post here and real, dedicated, announcements from interns who launched new technologies here and here. Some of our interns operate as if they were just one more engineer or staff member on an existing team, helping contribute to its mission. Others are tasked with more exploratory projects where we ask them to go research and prototype new ideas.

Aside from impactful project work, our internship program offers a deep dive into our culture, while providing interns with practical experience and leadership skills. They'll build a valuable professional network, from engaging in social events and coffee chats to gaining direct access to executives through exclusive Q&A sessions. Every intern is paired with a dedicated mentor, and they'll get the chance to present their final work to the entire company. By the end of the program, interns will not only have enhanced their skills but also built lasting relationships to benefit their future careers.

We are looking for talented, curious, empathetic, and hard working team members who are inspired by our mission to help build a better Internet. Come with the attitude to learn, and we will handle the rest. We do not expect interns to be immediate experts in the fields they are joining. The Internet is full of enough jokes about companies posting a job for an internship and asking for ten years of work experience.

We do try to match opportunities with the applicant’s study areas and relevant skills. We want to equip our interns for success and prefer, for example, finding software engineering opportunities for computer science students or accounting opportunities for finance majors. Each internship role posted will specify any specific preferences we have for areas of study. We recognize that many students have robust portfolios, GitHub projects, or open-source contributions. We'll optimize our matching process to connect you with a relevant team where you can immediately apply your skills and elevate your work.

Thousands of candidates apply for our internships each year. We expect this expansion to increase that level of interest significantly. To help identify the kinds of builders we want to recruit, we are going to fast track engineering and other candidates who complete an assignment to build a type of AI-powered application on Cloudflare (more details on that below).

As part of this program, we will only be hiring interns who can be present multiple days each week in one of our hub offices (generally 3-4 days depending on the team). Cloudflare has adopted a hybrid approach to work centered in “hub” locations around the world. The various hybrid approaches adopted by different teams are based on experimentation and their unique functions. For interns, we think it is important for new and early career team members here for a brief tenure to connect with each other as well as more senior leaders in our organization. We believe that mentorship and coaching is best done in person. 

We expect to post internship opportunities in the following Cloudflare office locations:

• Austin, USA

• New York City, USA

• San Francisco, USA

• Bengaluru, India

• Lisbon, Portugal

• London, UK

Our internships generally last for 12 weeks. While we plan to prioritize summer internships, we expect to hire significant numbers of interns in the spring and fall of 2026 as well.

Summer internships give students an opportunity to get experience without interrupting a school semester. The seasonal approach also makes it possible for us to create cohorts of interns who support each other on projects. That said, we know that education has changed a bit since we were in school. An increasing number of universities have developed programs for students to work with companies as part of a normal school semester, and others are more flexible in their approach to letting students choose to reduce hours or take a semester away from classwork to support an internship. 

We pay our interns. This means a competitive rate that is generally akin to the prorated salary of an entry-level position. And if you have to relocate temporarily to a city where we have an office, we will give you a stipend to support your travel and housing needs. Since we expect interns at Cloudflare to contribute immediately to real problem solving, it’s only fair to pay them accordingly. 

And we believe it's incredibly important to pay interns. Many long-term employment opportunities arise through internship programs, so it's unfair to limit those programs to those who can afford to relocate and work full time for little or no pay. 

1. Keep an eye on our career site, and specifically our internship opportunities listed here. We will start posting more internship opportunities for 2026 starting on October 15th. 

2. The intern opportunities page will link to our internship application portal that will streamline the application process. We plan to review applications in batches until all positions are filled. Our interview process will take 3-4 weeks.

3. Want a leg up? For the Software Engineering internship, we plan to fast track review of candidates who complete an assignment to build a type of AI-powered application on Cloudflare. Submit directly with your application.

We look forward to hearing from you.

In EMEA, that mission has special significance. The region is a patchwork of diverse markets, industries, and regulatory environments. It demands a partner-centric approach, one that empowers businesses of all sizes to harness Cloudflare’s comprehensive connectivity cloud platform to protect, connect, and accelerate their operations. That’s why I joined Cloudflare as VP of EMEA Partnerships.

Every great company has an inflection point, a moment when the market, the strategy, and the execution align to create unstoppable momentum. Cloudflare is at that moment now.

With record revenue growth, increasing traction among large customers, and an expanding suite of Zero Trust, AI, and network security solutions, Cloudflare is emerging as the partner of choice for enterprises and service providers across EMEA.

But what excites me most is the people, the opportunity to build a team in EMEA that is world-class in its expertise, relentless in its execution, and passionate about making an impact.

In my career, I’ve seen firsthand how the right partnerships can propel companies to new heights. I’ve led strategic alliances, built global partner ecosystems, and driven channel transformation across multiple organizations. But what I see at Cloudflare is different. It’s about empowering partners to drive innovation and solve customer challenges, with Cloudflare’s connectivity cloud platform and our network being one of the largest and most interconnected in the world, we’re committed to creating long-term value together.

When you listen, you can hear it, a low murmur, a distant echo of something big emerging. It starts quietly, almost imperceptibly, as forward-thinking companies and partners take notice. Then, momentum builds. More voices join in, more hands reach out. And before you know it, what was once a whisper becomes a roar. That’s what drew me to Cloudflare.

Cloudflare is not just evolving its partner program, it is investing in a partner-first strategy that will define its next phase of growth as a company. Cloudflare’s commitment to partners is clear and in EMEA we’re specifically prioritizing:

• Accelerating partner-led revenue, aiming for more than 90% of total EMEA revenue through partnerships.

• Expanding market penetration, helping partners unlock large enterprise accounts and new verticals.

• Supporting partners to build service practices, helping partners build the skills they need to excite their customers and deliver unmatched value with Cloudflare’s connectivity cloud.

• Partnering in the best way possible, ensuring that partners are equipped, enabled, and incentivized to succeed, and that we have aligned to the right stakeholders, systems, and processes to support that experience.

Great companies are built by great teams. One of the most exciting aspects of joining Cloudflare is the opportunity to assemble, develop, and lead a world-class partnerships team in EMEA.

Cloudflare is at an inflection point, expanding its enterprise presence, deepening its channel engagement, and driving a new level of execution excellence. To accelerate this, we need to attract the best talent, foster a high-performance culture, and build an environment where our people, and our partners, can thrive.

What this means to me:

• Hiring the best: We are scaling our team with well-known industry-leading professionals who bring deep partner expertise, enterprise sales acumen, and a passion for innovation.

• Empowering growth: Investing in skills, training, and development to ensure that our team is best-in-class in partner management, sales execution, and customer success.

• Creating a performance culture: Establishing clear goals, accountability, and incentives that drive results while fostering collaboration, creativity, and impact.

• Winning together: Aligning with our partners to co-create value, build long-term relationships, and drive sustained market leadership.

I joined Cloudflare because I see an extraordinary opportunity:

• To drive a partner-first transformation that scales across the region.

• To be part of a company that is not just winning in the market, but redefining it.

• To build and develop a world-class team that will shape the future of partnerships in EMEA.

Cloudflare is building something special. And I couldn’t be more excited to be part of the journey!

I will add, there was no better way to join the roar than coming together at our Partner Summit during Cloudflare Connect London last week! I hosted alongside key members of our executive and regional teams, with 130+ key partners in attendance for a day-long event of learning, networking, and celebrating our growing ecosystem. It set the foundation for what’s ahead, and I can’t wait to see what we accomplish together.

What drew me to Cloudflare was the unique combination of a powerful mission, a transparent and results-oriented culture, and the sheer scale of impact. Cloudflare isn’t just a technology company —  it’s a force for good, building a better Internet for everyone. This really resonates with my own values.  

My career has been defined by building, scaling, and developing teams in dynamic environments.  I’ve witnessed the transformative power of a strong culture in driving hypergrowth. I’ve experienced the intensity and agility required to disrupt a market. These experiences have reinforced my belief that people are the heart of any successful company, and that a people-first strategy is critical for long-term impact. During my interview process at Cloudflare, this belief was clearly evident in every conversation. Cloudflare is a place where people can do their best work and be proud of the impact they are making. Powered by innovation and rooted in purpose.

Cloudflare’s commitment to transparency is refreshing. In an industry often shrouded in secrecy, Cloudflare’s open approach fosters trust and collaboration. Perfectly aligned with my own leadership philosophy, which emphasizes open communication and honest feedback. I also deeply appreciate the “get things done” attitude, even if the “thing” isn’t perfect.  

Joining Cloudflare feels like a natural progression in my career. This is a significant opportunity to contribute to a scaling company that is not only at the forefront of technological advancement but also committed to making a positive impact on the world. I look forward to working alongside the talented team at Cloudflare to achieve our shared goals.

I am thrilled to embark on this journey to run Product and Engineering at Cloudflare, driving forward the mission of helping build a better Internet. 

While I was a graduate student at University of Illinois, the university introduced the Mosaic web browser to students. In addition to being super easy to install and use, it displayed pictures next to text for the first time. This may not seem impressive today, but back then it felt like a magical step forward.

This simple but powerful upgrade opened up the once niche user base from academics to the masses, transforming the world wide web to become an Internet phenomenon. Since then, I’ve always sought to be part of teams that worked on transformational technologies, including Software-as-a-Service, cloud computing, and AI. Innovation is the life blood of every technology company. To this day, I’m inspired by building products and technology that get adopted at mass scale.

The world is in a very interesting moment for technological innovation: the AI landscape is uncharted and developing at an exponential rate; the urgency for enterprises to reduce tech debt and reliance on legacy applications is at an all time high; multi-cloud deployments are becoming a reality for optimal performance and global scale; and high performance connectivity is table stakes. Cloudflare finds itself in a compelling position at the intersection of these key themes. We are uniquely poised to drive disruption and empower customers to do the same as they transform their businesses, and I’m excited to use my experience to help move our mission forward.

In order to reach massive scale, platforms need to be extensible (i.e., they need to be able to grow easily). The best way to do this is by knowing your customers’ biggest pain points and improving the core experience while creating adjacent products that solve their most challenging problems. Combined with being obsessed with your customers getting value and having a deep understanding of how the technology landscape is evolving around you, it becomes a powerful growth strategy.

This was the approach that I took during my time at ServiceNow, and one of the reasons why we were able to build the product business from $1.5 billion to $10+ billion in annualized revenue.

Cloudflare’s connectivity cloud — an innovative cloud native platform of security, network connectivity, and developer solutions — provides a unique foundation for driving value, no matter the industry. I’m excited to help Cloudflare further grow and refine our product offerings, while ensuring they are purpose-built and scalable to meet the needs of our growing customer base. Together, we can create solutions that empower any organization to enhance its global online presence while maintaining security and performance at the forefront.

It was very clear as I met many amazing people at Cloudflare, including co-founders Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn, that the team takes pride in solving deep technical Internet infrastructure problems while putting customers first. In addition to working with world-class product and engineering teams, I am looking forward to collaborating with the wider business, our partners, and our customers to realize the potential of Cloudflare's people, platform, and organic growth. I’m looking forward to helping build a better Internet with Cloudflare!

During the summer of 2024, Cloudflare welcomed approximately 60 Intern-ets from all around the globe on a mission to #HelpBuildABetterInternet. Over the course of their internships, our wonderful interns tackled real-world challenges from different teams all over the company and contributed to cutting-edge projects. As returning interns, we – Shaheen, Aaron, and Jada – would like to show off the great work our cohort has done and experiences we’ve had throughout our time here.

_{Austin Interns after volunteering at the Central Texas Food Bank.}

Cloudflare interns take pride in driving high-impact initiatives, playing a vital role in advancing Cloudflare's mission. With our diverse roles and projects this summer, we'd love to highlight some of the exciting work we've been involved in:

Rahul, a Software Engineer intern, built a system to autograde intern application assignments for future students looking to join Cloudflare. It was built entirely on the Cloudflare Developer Platform, using Cloudflare Access, Browser Rendering, D1, Durable Objects, R2, and Workers!

Jessica, a Software Engineer intern, created a new threads api for the Workers AI team that automatically recalls past messages when running inference, helping developers to generate chat sessions when building personalized chatbots.

Anshika, an Internal Audit intern, worked on SOX & ISO testing for the first quarter of 2024, a data center audit, and is helping to roll out the automation of SOC 2 testing.

Jake, a Business Development Relations intern, led the creation and launch of an outbound BDR campaign that generated new pipeline for Cloudflare involving tailored messaging, account criteria, and enablement materials.

Utkarsh, a Software Engineer intern, built an internal tool for the Capacity Planning team to simulate unforeseen scenarios and changes within the Cloudflare network infrastructure, to help them provision new servers more efficiently.

Shaheen, a Product Management intern, and Anantharaman, a Software Engineer Intern, collaboratively enhanced Cloudflare D1 with improvements in billing observability, the dashboard, and Wrangler commands while also launching billing alerts and audit logs.

Jada, a Software Engineer intern, developed a Policy Tester feature for the Zero Trust Access Policies page to enable Cloudflare customers to view policy update statistics, using Cloudflare Durable Objects for the RESTful API.

Dhravya, a Software Engineer intern, helped launch function calling in Workers AI, a feature that enables LLMs to dynamically perform actions or retrieve data.

Prajjwal, a Research intern, focused on personalizing the WAF attack score and enhancing the overall user experience while experimenting with zero-shot learning techniques to detect new and evolving attacks.

Megan, a Security Analytics intern, ensured a smooth transition to an in-house security access tool by managing internal user access, aligning group rules, and addressing missing or duplicated groups/users during system migrations.

For the first time since the pandemic, Cloudflare had over half of our interns in-person in our Austin, Lisbon and London offices. As the saying goes, everything is bigger in Texas and our new Austin office intern class shows it, with over 20 interns working in-person throughout the summer! Some of our favorite events were…

Intern ping-pong tournament After weeks of ping-pong classes, our interns got to put their skills to the test with a ping-pong tournament! The competition was fierce, with paddles flying and cheers echoing throughout the office as everyone battled for the title of Ping-Pong Champion. In the end, Josh, a PM intern on Workers, stole the show and was crowned as the 2024 Ping-Pong Champion.

_{Interns in the Austin office participating in the Ping-Pong tournament.}

Food Bank Volunteering The Austin interns got the opportunity to give back to the community this summer at the Central Texas Food Bank. With the help of our full-timers the team got to work instantly, from packing food boxes to helping organize donations. Thanks to all the hard work, the team was able to feed a total of 9,000 people!

_{Austin Interns volunteering at the Central Texas Food Bank.}

Austin Game Show The Austin interns had the exciting opportunity to participate in an exciting game show with their wonderful recruiters. This competitive showdown saw the “Winter-nets” face off against the “Return-ets” in a series of fun and challenging activities, including Family Feud and Wheel of Fortune. In the end, the Return-ets took the victory, with perhaps one too many pictures to prove it. Events like this are among the best, fostering bonding and friendly competition that bring everyone closer together.

_{“Return-ets” posing with the trophy they won.}

Our Lisbon office also had 10 interns join Cloudflare and spend time doing some awesome things, including…

Visiting the Lisbon Data Center One of the most impressive parts of Cloudflare is its infrastructure, which spans hundreds of data centers worldwide. This summer, our interns were able to get up close and personal with our Lisbon data center where they ventured through Cloudflare’s state-of-the-art server rooms. They witnessed the security measures that are in place to ensure the safety of our data and the support systems that ensure that the facility is able to run nonstop.

_{Interns and Cloudflarians taking a photo in the Lisbon data center.}

Our remote interns got to take on some virtual adventures throughout the summer, building friendships and memories from all around the globe! Some of the highlights were…

Interns all over the globe were shipped a box filled with an assortment of Japanese snacks and got to spend time together snacking on unique and new foods. This event not only satisfied our snack cravings but also strengthened our global connections with a fun, shared experience.

_{Remote interns showing their favorite snacks from the snack boxes we received.}

Throughout the summer, interns got the chance to mingle with one another as well as the rest of the company. For a break from project work and a time to socialize, interns looked forward to Virtual Intern Game Days and Gatheround meetups. These designated online hangout blocks made for a more fun and inclusive experience for the remote interns. Along with that, remote interns near Cloudflare offices were welcome to join in-person events throughout the summer: from team lunches to arts & crafts and social mixers, visiting the office is always worth the trip!

_{Group photo of a Gatherround session with the interns and Cloudfriends.}

Executive chats have been a key part of ensuring our interns get to truly know our top leaders and ask them questions 1-on-1. This summer was no exception, with interns hosting over eight executive chats filled with inspiring stories, valuable knowledge, and meaningful connections. Here’s what our interns had to say about it…

Sasha enjoyed talking with Matthew Prince, Chief Executive Officer: “It was so heartfelt and emotional. I had heard the story of Lee Holloway before, but hearing it from Matthew himself was really impactful.” 

Chantal loved the talk with Michele Yetman, Chief People Officer: “I enjoyed hearing about her job history and how she carefully adapted skill sets from her previous jobs to craft her career. Also, she was curious to hear our perspective and answered our questions in honest detail.”

Anantharaman liked the talk with Dane Knecht, SVP of Emerging Technology and Innovation: “Learning about the growth of ETI, the Austin office and the mission to move fast and break things within ETI to nurture a startup-y culture was very interesting.”

Matilde valued the talk with Nitin Rao, Interim Chief Product Officer: “I didn't know much about him beforehand, but I found it fascinating to learn about his role at the company and the great impact of his contributions to Cloudflare's current infrastructure.”

Each summer, Cloudflare Intern-ets have the opportunity to showcase their work during the annual Intern Presentations series. Hundreds of Cloudflarians join in to support and celebrate the interns including Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn. As Jake, a BDR Operations Intern, puts it, “The opportunity to present in front of the founders and the rest of the company speaks volumes about how much Cloudflare values its interns' projects.”

Cloudfriends is a program specifically for interns to socialize with people throughout Cloudflare. Cloudflare employees from various departments signed up, and we were able to schedule meetings with all of them. These meetings let us get to know more people, share experiences, and keep in touch (even after our internships have ended). On a similar note, Cloudflare has a program for Random Employee Chats that interns can also take part in. These chats randomly pair you with another Cloudflare employee once a week and allow you to do even more socializing.

Throughout our time here at Cloudflare, we formed numerous unforgettable memories that truly made our internship experience one of a kind.

Cloudflare is filled with the most driven, passionate, and all around amazing people, so it’s no wonder that we all had a spectacular time interacting with everyone!

Ananya took networking to the next level by engaging with 49 people throughout her internship, forging valuable connections across the company. Meanwhile, Yomna wasted no time setting up 25 1:1s by the end of her second week, meeting a bunch of awesome people along the way.

Sasha, Shaheen, Jack, Jake, Jaden, and Josh hit up a local Austin restaurant and spent SIX hours bonding over laughs, talks, and good vibes. From strangers to friends, this was a moment that will last well beyond their internships.

Carol and Jessica enjoyed their teams’ on-site events in the Austin office. They were able to meet all of their team members face-to-face and work and have fun together. The numerous on-site events that took place over the summer let the Austin Intern-ets connect with people from all over the company, including other Intern-ets that were remote or working out of another office.

Dhanush and Utkarsh gathered the interns to enjoy the Olympics in the Austin office. They all sat in the same area, talked with each other, and while watching the intense competition.

Aaron, Carol, and Tara enjoyed all the game nights the R2 team hosted. They played a variety of board and card games from For Sale to Brass: Birmingham that everyone enjoyed, and they even did some late-night karaoke. Anshika also enjoyed the games that the Internal Audit team played before their all-hands meetings, such as skribbl.io. These events let everyone on the team be more connected and overall just have fun.

The Austin interns filled their time with loads of different activities. From a dinner with Matthew, to visiting Barton Springs, to hosting a 4th of July barbecue party on top of a high-rise and overlooking Austin’s skyline, they certainly didn’t miss an opportunity to get out and have fun.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the London interns enjoyed their lunches on the beach. They were able to talk, swim, and get to know each other. The Lisbon office also hosted a bunch of team lunches that allowed everyone to work together and enjoy the sun.

Dhravya's caffeine fix: Dhravya drank around 250 cups of coffee over the course of his 12-week internship.

Matilde the bus marathoner: Every week, Matilde traveled 740 km from Braga to the Lisbon office by bus. By the end of her internship, she had accumulated 108 hours and 8880 km.

Anantharaman's epic commute: Anantharaman chose to turn his daily commute into a marathon, walking over 100 miles during his 14-week internship.

Jack the Linux legend: Jack was the second most active Linux-based developer for dash.cloudflare.com.

Josh the Ping-Pong prodigy: Josh started his internship as a ping-pong newbie but after daily break-time practice, he smashed his way to win the intern ping-pong tournament.

Wing night warriors: The Austin interns PROUDLY placed 24th in the Pluckers Wing night trivia.

Wondering how to get the most out of your time as an intern? We surveyed the Intern-ets for some insider hints…

Be curious and don’t be afraid to ask questions: An overwhelming number of Intern-ets and executives alike emphasized the importance of staying curious and keeping an open mind. Aside from that, asking questions can make a huge difference to get unstuck or even think ahead on problems; As Nikhil, a SWE Intern, points out, “Cloudflare is vast, and people are super friendly + eager to help.”

The importance of introductions: PM Intern Yomna notes how “cross-functional work…always works best when you are able to establish proper connections, a unified voice, and an open space that is dedicated to tackling the problem/situation at hand” and BDR Operations Intern Blaise recommends that interns “...make meetings with everyone on your team just to understand what each person is working on, and where you may be able to slot in”

Data on data: Marketing Analytics Intern Tanuj provides some insight, highlighting how “In analytics, it's crucial to be data-informed rather than just data-driven. For instance, data might suggest cutting a high-spend marketing campaign due to low short-term ROI. However, understanding the business context – such as the campaign's role in building brand loyalty can reveal its long-term value. Always consider the broader picture for more impactful insights.”

Sign up here to be notified of new graduate and internship opportunities for 2025. Cloudflare is also hiring for full-time opportunities: check out open positions and apply today!

I’m delighted to be joining Cloudflare as Vice President of Sales in the US, Canada, and Latin America.

I’ve had the privilege of leading sales for some of the world’s most iconic tech companies, including IBM and Cisco. During my career I’ve led international teams numbering in the thousands and driving revenue in the billions of dollars while serving some of the world's largest enterprise customers. I’ve seen first-hand the evolution of technology and what it can achieve for businesses, from robotics, automation, and data analytics, to cloud computing, cybersecurity, and AI.

I firmly believe Cloudflare is well on its way to being one of the next iconic tech companies.

Cloudflare has a unique opportunity to help businesses navigate an enduring wave of technological change. There are few companies in the world that operate in the three most exciting fields of innovation that will continue to shape our world in the coming years: cloud computing, AI, and cybersecurity. Cloudflare is one of those companies. When I was approached for this role, I spoke to a wide range of connections across the financial sector, private companies, and government. The feedback was unanimous that Cloudflare is poised on the edge of exhilarating growth.

I was fortunate to join Cisco two years after its annual revenue passed the \$1 billion mark and had the privilege of helping scale the business to more than \$49 billion in revenue the year I left. Cloudflare passed the \$1 billion milestone just last year, and I see the same potential for growth here as I saw at Cisco.

Cloudflare's global sales organization is growing. I’m excited to help accelerate that process in a way that delivers recurring revenue for the business while ensuring we retain a very high bar in terms of the talent we bring onto the team. My experience leading complex, cross-functional sales organizations within large global companies has taught me a great deal about the common traits among highly effective sales functions.

The groups of individuals that come together to make true teams are the ones that successfully focus on a unifying goal and develop skills like communication, attitude, process, organization, consistency, collaboration, partnership, and accountability.  These teams embrace diversity and bring out of each other the best expertise, creativity, and skills, making the team stronger and keeping the goal in focus.

We will achieve the opportunity ahead of us only as long as we have our customers as our north star. Today, the Americas represent more than half of Cloudflare’s revenue worldwide and are home to some of our largest and most strategic customers – both in the private and public sectors – including 30% of the Fortune 1000. Brands from Zendesk to Shopify and from Colgate-Palmolive to Mars rely on Cloudflare to operate their businesses in a fast, secure, and reliable way.

Whatever the technology, there are three common fundamentals I’ve found essential to creating value for customers: being the expert on their challenges, understanding how to pick the right combination of products, services, and solutions from those available, and knowing your competition.

Cloudflare already has an incredible and growing range of products and services that are helping millions of individuals and organizations maximize the opportunities presented by cloud computing and generative AI, all while staying safe from the threat of cyberattacks.

If it were needed, one additional deciding factor behind my excitement in joining Cloudflare is its ambitious mission to help build a better Internet. As a father, I want the Internet to be a safe and valuable resource for my family and friends and for generations to come. I don’t want my daughter to have to worry about her personal data and privacy as she’s buying Billie Eilish concert tickets online (and, yes, I’m going too).

Today Cloudflare’s connectivity cloud protects nearly 20% of all websites online and stops 209 billion cyber attacks daily. In addition to its growing customer base, Cloudflare is living up to its mission by offering its services for free to millions more individuals and small businesses, including the most vulnerable voices online through its Project Galileo initiative.

The combination of a strong mission, genuine values, a great team, and incredible technology isn’t a given in every company, but is evident at Cloudflare. I’m excited to play a part as Cloudflare continues to scale its business and help build a better Internet for everyone.

If you’re interested in learning more about what Cloudflare can do for your organization, please get in touch here. If you’re an ambitious, talented sales professional looking for your next challenging and rewarding career move, check out our open positions here.

I am excited to announce that I joined Cloudflare last month as Head of Australia & New Zealand, to continue to build on Cloudflare’s success in the region through extending our valuable relationships with our customers and partners.

I’ve been fortunate over my 25-year career in the IT industry to have worked for some of the most recognised and innovative organisations such as Oracle, Salesforce, and Zendesk. It’s been exciting to be inside these businesses as they’ve taken new ideas about how software can be developed and delivered to solve real world problems for any organisation’s customers. I’ve learned a lot by being a part of the industry, but probably more importantly, I’ve learned the most from the smart, experienced, diverse groups of talented people that I’ve had the pleasure to work with in ANZ and across Asia Pacific. I have always been interested in the problems that organisations are trying to solve through technology — for example, responding to strategic challenges, reducing cost, improving revenue, reducing risk — and joining Cloudflare is an opportunity to stay focussed on addressing those critical issues with our customers and partners using Cloudflare’s innovative solutions.

Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. So the question I asked myself is, “why is that so important?” In truth, the Internet has become such an integral part of our everyday lives that we take it for granted and forget that we are using it today in ways for which it was not originally designed or architected. It doesn’t have the security, performance, or reliability that is required to ensure the integrity that the modern world expects. Legacy solutions to solve these problems aren’t scalable or cost-effective. This became especially true once the cloud happened.

The solution has been a massive shift at the network layer as “as-a-service” delivery architecture evolves. Cloudflare is leading this transition through its extensive global network, providing security and enhancing the performance of business critical applications, while at the same time eliminating the cost and complexity of managing network hardware within a global cloud platform.

On this basis I’m convinced that Cloudflare, with its distributed network, continued focus on innovation, as well as our commitment to helping our customers, is in the best position to respond to the challenges being presented.

I live in Melbourne and enjoy all the wonderful things that the city has to offer, from beautiful parks for some exercise, to its vibrant restaurant and bar scene, to the exciting array of major and global sporting events such as the AFL, Australian Open Tennis and Formula One Grand Prix. I love spending time with family and friends.

I’m looking forward to working with our customers and partners on their projects to deliver genuine business value. I believe that Cloudflare’s products and solutions will make a real difference to the way organisations in every part of ANZ’s economy can successfully respond to today’s security challenges.

We have always strived to make Cloudflare somewhere where our entire team feels safe and empowered to bring their whole selves to work. It’s the best way to enable the many incredible people we have working here to be able to do their best work. With that as context, we are proud to share that Cloudflare has been certified and recognized as one of the Top 100 Most Loved Workplaces in 2023 by Newsweek and the Best Practice Institute (BPI) for the second consecutive year.  

Cloudflare’s ranking follows surveys of more than 2 million employees at companies with team sizes ranging from 50 to 10,000+, and includes US-based firms and international companies with a strong US presence. As part of the qualification for the certification, Cloudflare participated in a company-wide global employee survey — so this award isn’t a hypothetical, it’s driven by our employees’ sentiment and responses.

With this recognition, we wanted to reflect on what’s new, what’s remained the same, and what’s ahead for the team at Cloudflare. There are a few things that especially stand out:

Helping to build a better Internet.

If you speak to any member of the Cloudflare team about why they’re here, they’ll almost certainly talk about our mission. Whether it’s in our careers, or our lives more generally, so many of us have been positively impacted by the Internet. It is an incredible resource for humanity, and being able to contribute back to it is definitely a draw for many Cloudflarians. In an internal survey from September 2023, 92% of our team stated that they are inspired by Cloudflare’s mission to help build a better Internet — and 88% said that their work is important to the company.

Working on these kinds of problems, at the scale Cloudflare is at, requires constant innovation and figuring out solutions at the frontier of technology. At the same time, Cloudflare for years has been giving back to the community and society — through programs like Project Galileo, Athenian Project, and Project Cybersafe Schools — that make us especially proud of the work we do.

Cloudflarians get a real sense of our company culture, team, mission, and how we work, right when they start interviewing with us. Candidate feedback paints a picture of what this looks and feels like:

“The entire process is really different from anything I’ve experienced before — and I’m enjoying it very much. Also, the informal tone makes it much more human and everyone is so approachable.”  

“I’ve never met a group of people at a company that are all consistently excited about the work they are doing.”

Before anyone gets an offer, every candidate in the final stage connects with one of our executive leaders including our co-founders. This has been part of our interview process for many years, and is designed to ensure candidates truly understand what they’re signing up for in their role as part of joining the Cloudflare team, and to make our executive team accessible to everyone starting on day one. Transparency is one of our core values, and we want all employees to have a direct line to our leadership.

Transparency also serves as our guiding light when we engage with the public. We are quick to share detailed reports amid and after incidents, in the hopes that they will benefit the Internet-at-large. And we share regular impact reports detailing our progress around key environmental, social, and governance initiatives.

We have continued to receive unmatched interest with close to half a million applicants in the first half of 2023, which is nearly a 300% increase from 2022. Our offer acceptance rate remained equally as impressive at a rate of 90%. We are continuing to hire worldwide with hundreds of open positions across the organization ranging from Sales to Engineering.

We are committed to developing a globally distributed team with a flexible working approach. Individual teams opt into: hybrid, remote, or in-office, depending on what works best for the folks on the team, and the team more broadly. As an example, we've seen less tenured folks on certain teams wanting to go into the office more frequently to work together in-person. For reasons across the board, we give teams the ability to choose what works best for them. We’ve found that this approach gives teams the opportunity to establish their optimal working arrangements that fit with their objectives and enable collaboration.

Our paid time off policy is on a take-what-you-need basis. We encourage employees to find a comfortable work-life balance by taking as many days off as they need while still being able to perform their jobs satisfactorily.

We want to empower and inspire our team members to do their best work every day — and this includes making sure they feel happy, healthy, and fulfilled both inside and outside of our workplace. Aside from comprehensive healthcare benefits, this also includes support for family planning like parental leave and Carrot Fertility, access to mental health and mindfulness programs through Ginger and Headspace apps, and three days of paid time off each year to volunteer in our respective communities.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion is a priority at Cloudflare to help ensure a sense of belonging and community for all of our employees and to best propel our business forward. Our 15+ Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) are employee-led and have designated executive sponsors of each group. These communities come together to support each other, celebrate their cultures, and help with initiatives to educate, support professional development, and more. We have a robust number of ERGs and this continues to grow as the diversity at Cloudflare expands.

Our employees believe that Cloudflare is a special place, with an especially meaningful mission. They believe there is no other place where a team so small is having such a large impact on the Internet. To keep up, it's critical that we have great people across the company to help us continue our mission. To learn more about the Cloudflare career opportunities, please check out Cloudflare Careers!

One piece of advice I received early in my career was to get into a transformative industry. Those words have followed me ever since, and it’s a goal I’ve encouraged many others to pursue.

For me, it meant first launching into biotechnology where I learned my passion for working with deeply technical and disruptive businesses doing things that hadn’t been done before.

I later joined Amazon at a time when it was best known as a retailer instead of a technology company as it is today. While there, I led HR for some of their most technical businesses from eCommerce to AWS. As all these businesses scaled over the next decade, I became increasingly focused, and then finally fully dedicated to, leading HR for AWS. During that time, I had the opportunity to serve as a thought partner to the AWS CEO and leadership team as the organization grew from 400 employees to 30,000.

It was at this point in my career that I realized my passion for scaling a company with practices that reinforce the mission and building programs with intention to nurture the culture. To have any impact, all this work must be in support of promoting a diverse and inclusive workplace that values individual and group differences to ensure all employees, across a diversity of backgrounds and perspectives, feel valued, welcome, and integrated.

Later, I took all those learnings to Tableau as Chief Human Resource Officer (CHRO) before it was acquired by Salesforce. Like AWS, Tableau was ready to begin its next phase of growth and I designed and implemented the next generation talent strategy that supported the long-term growth plans for the business.

Today, as a two-time Chief People Officer and with experience and passion for scaling large global companies, building is in my DNA. That’s why Cloudflare’s bold mission to “help to build a better Internet” excites me. I am a builder at my core, and am humbled for the opportunity to help build again and to be selected to join the team for this next phase of the Cloudflare journey.

There are three things that stood out to me and made this next step an easy one:

Cloudflare caught my attention as a next generation disruptor in the tech industry by offering security, availability, and scalability of applications with no trade off with speed. The advancement of generative AI and Cloudflare's partnership with many of these businesses as customers put it front and center at a transformative time in the tech space.

It was evident with each interview how the company deeply values both its customers and its people. The transparency and keen attention on scaling what is already a very special place to work was evident with each conversation. That really resonated with me. I always view my work through the lens of how it impacts people, leaders, and customers. For me, putting both customers and people at the center of everything we do on the Cloudflare’s growing People team is paramount as we create the people strategy that supports achieving the company’s high-growth business objectives.

Too often, company culture is defined by, and confined to, employee handbooks and posters on the wall. In rarer cases, it's something that is both innate and carefully nurtured by leaders who demonstrate their values through their actions. That’s what I’ve found at Cloudflare. The transparency, trust, and curiosity of this organization is energizing. The people I’ve had the opportunity to engage with have been warm, humble, and bright.

As I launch in my new position here at Cloudflare, my priority will be to first learn as much as I can about the people-first culture and ensure the work we do within the People team is aligned. I’m excited to bring my own curiosity and passion for disruptive and transformative companies to a new team to help Cloudflare scale and flourish, and help build amazing careers for all of our people.

This year, Cloudflare welcomed a class of approximately 40 interns, hailing from five different countries for an unforgettable summer. As we joined both remotely and in-person across Cloudflare’s global offices, our experiences spanned a variety of roles from engineering, product management to internal auditing and marketing. Through invaluable mentorship, continuous learning, and the chance to make a real-world impact, our summer was truly enriched at every step. Join us, Anni and Emilie, as we provide an insider's perspective on a summer at Cloudflare, sharing snippets and quotes from our intern cohort.

You might have noticed that we have a new name for the interns: the Intern-ets! Our fresh intern nickname was born from a brainstorm between us and our recruiter, Judy. While “Cloudies”, “Cloudterns”, and “Flaries” made the shortlist, a company-wide vote crowned "Intern-ets" as the favorite. And just like that, we've made Cloudflare history!

We're all incredibly proud to have gotten the opportunity to tackle interesting and highly impactful projects throughout the duration of our internships. To give you a glimpse of our summer, here are a few that showcase the breadth and depth of our experiences.

Mia M., Product Manager intern, worked on the Cloudflare Secrets Store, which is a new product that will allow Cloudflare customers to store, encrypt, and deploy sensitive data across the product suite. She focused on creating requirements for the core platform and tackling the first milestone, bringing secrets and environment variables from the per-Worker level to the account level in the Workers platform.

Pierre, Research intern, focused on integrating differential privacy—a layer of protection with formal privacy guarantees—into distributed aggregation protocols. This privacy layer is imperative for user trust and data security as these protocols are commonly used for collecting sensitive information, such as browser telemetry or health data.

Johnny, Software Engineer intern, worked on a new feature for API Shield called Object-Level Access Policies as a first step in a solution to combat Broken Object-Level Authorization, which has been ranked as the #1 API Security flaw by OWASP. This feature will enable customers to specify explicit allowlists and blocklists for API traffic per object.

Olivia, Project Manager intern, led the Dissatisfied (DSAT) Customer Outreach Project and JIRA Automations for the Customer Support team. The DSAT project involves reaching out to Premium customers who express dissatisfaction with the goal of providing personalized contact to ensure they feel valued. The JIRA Automation project aims to create zero-touch tickets, removing Customer Support as the middle man.

Also don’t forget to check out the amazing intern projects that got featured in a blog post!

Emilie, Software Engineering intern introduced a debugging feature for Cloudflare Queues.

Joaquin, Software Engineer intern added a new Workers Database integration.

Austin, Software Engineer intern created scheduled deletion for Cloudflare Stream.

Beyond our projects, we had tons of fun getting to meet other Cloudflarians and experience the vibrant Cloudflare culture. Let's dive into some of the standout moments that made our internships truly special!

This summer, the interns dotted the globe, working from cozy home setups to bustling offices in cities. Regardless of where we worked, we had a blast. Here's what some fellow interns have to say about their work experiences:

Austin office: Jada loved her colleagues at the Austin office as they were “warm and open to exploring the city, [...], and hanging out outside of work”. Anni and Maximo loved attending the Austin-based team summit where they attended strategy sessions and met the team in-person.

San Francisco office: Emmanuel F. enjoyed getting to interact with other engineers during SF Team Lunches. Matthew enjoyed working on the rooftop to a view of the city skyline. Jonathan appreciated the hybrid work model enjoyed by SF employees.

Remote work: Johnny liked the distributed and flexible work style that the company embraces. Daniël, also working remotely and found it amusing how “[s]everal people have noticed the Feynman Lectures on Physics on the shelf behind me in my home and have asked about it.”

Remote intern events: Emmanuel G., Aaron, and Feiyu enjoyed the intern calls that were held on GatherRound as “it was a fun, quick way to get to meet everyone.” Pradyumna particularly liked it when we played skribbl.io.

With so many exceptional minds at Cloudflare, every interaction became a chance for us to learn and grow. Here are some awe-inspiring individuals who have made our internships unforgettable:

Harshal, Systems Engineer: Aaron is grateful for his mentor Harshall. “I always left our conversations knowing more than I did coming into them”.

Revathy, Systems Engineer: Harshini is thankful to her mentor Revathy for “how she helps me to learn [...] the best way possible to do something and ultimately achieve my goals”.

Nevi, Product Manager: Anni admires her manager Nevi who is always thinking about the team and our customers and has invested in the personal growth and mentorship of interns.

Conner, Systems Engineer: Jonathan is grateful that he was always able to count on Conner for great engineering tips, guidance, and NeoVim wizardry.

Malgorzata, Data Scientist: Jada looks up to Malgorzata for being so welcoming, kind, and funny. She has a great attitude and besides being super knowledgeable, she is also willing to share her expertise and support others!

During our internships, we engaged in Executive fireside chats, diving deep with Cloudflare's top leaders. Each chat was insightful and surprising in a different way, and some of our favorite takeaways were…

John, CTO: Shaheen valued John’s humility in emphasizing daily learning from others at work, stating, “As I grow in my career, I intend to keep a similar attitude and try to learn from those around me by keeping myself grounded.”

Doug Kramer, General Counsel: Emilie valued Doug Kramer's advice on identifying a career "north star" to guide intentions while also recognizing "exit-ramps" or alternative paths that may offer unexpected fulfillment.

Matthew Prince, Co-founder and CEO: Yunfan loved hearing “the story about how Cloudflare developed from a start-up till today”.

Michelle Zatlyn, Co-founder and COO: Harsh learned from Michelle about “how they moved across the country, against everyone's advice, to start Cloudflare”, and Mia C. enjoyed learning that “Cloudflare started as a business school project”.

A bonding point for the Intern-ets was our love for snacks! In July, we gathered the Intern-ets together for a virtual snack break. The University team sent out a box featuring snacks from Indonesia, a country none of us had visited (or tried goodies from… yet!). Below you can see us holding up our favorite snacks from the box!

Meanwhile, the on-site interns couldn't get enough of the office snacks. Favorites? Pita chips, Lucky Charms, chocolate almonds, coconut chocolate bars and coconut water. Plus, the Austin and San Francisco offices even have a Sour Patch Kids dispenser! Snack on!

Every day at Cloudflare presented unexpected joys and challenges. Here's what the interns found most surprising:

High Impact: Simon, Emmanuel F. and Maximo were surprised to “[do] such visible and important work as an intern”. Austin agreed, noting “I was treated like any other member of the team [...] It felt like I was working on something important and not just a typical intern project!” Harshini added, “when [colleagues] hear what I am working on they go - ‘that is really cool, I can't wait to see that happen - we need it.’”

Support: Eames “was worried that it would feel like my achievements were the only thing that mattered. But my colleagues always showed concern for how I was feeling and how things were going, and I couldn't be more grateful for that.”

Industry vs Academia: Johnny mentioned “coming from academia, I was amazed by the amount of effort that has been, and is continuing to be, put into the products to really productionize what I have only before seen in research. It is another reminder of the scale in which we work!”

Here are some fun stats from our internship…

• Johnny drove 30 hours from New York to Colorado

• Maximo missed 0 days of going to the Austin office

• Anni drank 86 matcha lattes this summer

• Emilie participated in 38 Cloudfriends calls and coffee chats

• Simon has waited around one week cumulatively for builds to finish

At Cloudflare, our internships aren’t just about work—they're about growth, mentorship, and real impact. We've built more than projects; we've forged lasting relationships. It’s been an unforgettable summer of challenges, bonding, and authentic experiences. For more about our journey this summer, check out our Cloudflare TV segment with Michelle Zatlyn, Co-founder and COO.

Finally, we would love to give a huge thanks to our university recruiters Judy, Trang, and Dani for creating such an amazing internship experience for us this summer!

Sign up here to be notified of new grad and internship opportunities for 2024. Cloudflare is also hiring for full-time opportunities: check out open positions and apply today!

I am absolutely thrilled and feel incredibly blessed to have joined Cloudflare as Chief Security Officer (CSO). Cybersecurity has always been my passion and focus of my career. I am grateful to join such a dynamic and innovative team. Cloudflare is a cybersecurity industry leader and offers unmatched technology that is second to none.

I have been a CSO for over 20 years in the financial and private sectors with SVB, HSBC, McAfee, Ameren, and Scottrade. I have been privileged to lead the security teams of some of the world's largest, most complex, and most innovative companies; however, my greatest honor has been working with and collaborating among some of the world's most amazing people. I have learned my dedication, expertise, and passion from my leaders, peers, and teams, which have taught me how to build and lead world-class security programs that protect organizations from the most sophisticated threats. Because security is constantly evolving, the key is, and always will be, to build an active, diverse community of highly empathetic people that will successfully protect the organization.

As I step into my new role as CSO at Cloudflare, I am excited to take on the challenge of defending the company and 20% of all websites. My charter is to protect Cloudflare from sophisticated threats and to promote a culture of innovation that enables us to stay ahead of the curve in the ever-evolving cybersecurity landscape. By fostering a mindset of creativity and continuous improvement, we will develop solutions that protect our customers from the most complex cybersecurity challenges that significantly impact them.

The last aspect of my charter is to share the Cloudflare story with our customers to ensure they are protected and leverage all of the Cloudflare technology.  We can do this through collaboration and knowledge-sharing with our customers. By sharing the Cloudflare story and collaborating with our customers, we can all help build a better and more secure Internet.

As someone who is passionate about technology, security, and its potential to improve our lives, I knew that I wanted to work for a company that shared those values. So, when I began my job search, I set out to find the best company to work for that aligned with my interests and career goals. After researching and considering many different options, I met with Cloudflare, and I was blown away.

First and foremost, I was drawn to Cloudflare's mission to help create a secure, faster, and more reliable Internet for everyone. I was impressed by their strong mission, direction, and commitment to building a better Internet. As someone who shares their passion for making the Internet a better place, I found it inspiring to join a company with a mission that aligns so closely with my own values.

Another reason I chose to join Cloudflare was its network capabilities and cloud technology. They have built a highly sophisticated and innovative global network that I have not seen matched within the industry. As a CSO, I find Cloudflare in a unique leadership position to protect our customers due to their unmatched capabilities and unique market position. While Cloudflare is already a leader in every space where they operate, they have a significant track record of building on their fantastic platform by continuously improving their technology to be best in class.

In addition to their impressive technology, I was also impressed by their customer base. The most prominent and respected companies in the world use Cloudflare's services, and I am excited to share "How Cloudflare does it" to help our customers be even more successful and give them a unique opportunity to see how we do it internally.

Lastly, the interview process and the people I met at Cloudflare significantly influenced my decision to join the team. Throughout my 17 interviews, I was impressed by the professionalism and passion of the people I met. I connected with each person and was excited by the team's commitment to the company's mission. I am very proud and humbled to join the Cloudflare family! I look forward to hearing from our customers and employees and how I can help them!

At Cloudflare, we have strived to build a workplace where our entire team feels safe and excited to bring their whole selves to work, so they can do their best work. That’s why we are proud to share that Cloudflare has been named one of the Top 100 Most Loved Workplaces in 2022 by Newsweek and Best Practice Institute (BPI). Most Loved Workplaces recognizes companies where their workers love, and feel in sync with, the company they work for.

With this, and as we’re approaching the end-of 2022, we thought this was a good time to reflect on some of the things that go into being one of these Most Loved Workplaces and just some of what makes up our workplace and culture.

Something that really grounds our entire team is Cloudflare’s mission: to help build a better Internet. When you are solving some of the toughest challenges facing the Internet — helping make the Internet secure, fast, private, and reliable globally — you need a range of talented individuals to do this. The people at Cloudflare are exactly that, and are essential to our impact on the Internet.

The Internet wasn’t built for what it’s being used for today. In order for the Internet to work the way it does today, from powering critical infrastructure, to making it so that a busy working parent can order a healthy dinner right to their home, requires constant innovation on our part to make sure these online services can withstand the demand online, load quick, and not face cyber attacks and breaches. Cloudflare has a significantly large responsibility online, with about 20% of the web running through our network today — and every single team member here is contributing to this.

In addition to the results from Newsweek and BPI, Cloudflare additionally conducted an internal survey of its global team. This presented results of 94% of surveyed employees stating that they are inspired by Cloudflare’s mission to help build a better Internet. At Cloudflare, 92% of employees say their manager treats them with respect and 92% state that their work is important to the company.

“I've worked for so many Fortune 500, top companies in tech, and never have I felt more valued and grown so much than at Cloudflare. I love going to work, love working with my manager and team, we learn so much from each other and are motivated to smash sales goals and grow our presence in the world. ”

“...I love this company, management, and most of all my team. I am proud to be building a better Internet, and will continue to do so for years to come.”

“Honestly it is the best I've ever worked; it is a lot of work, and sometimes it can be stressful, but I'm sure I can count on my manager for support, and they take their time to explain again and again without making me feel bad for asking.”

“Having had the privilege to work at Cloudflare for the past five years, I can genuinely attest that our people are clearly our biggest asset. I personally feel empowered, respected, and yet intellectually challenged daily. It is impressive for any single company to assemble such a diverse and thoughtful group of co-workers. And it all starts with our leadership.”

Cloudflare offers a comprehensive total rewards and benefits package, and invests in supporting team members through a variety of initiatives and programs.

Examples of benefits range — from our commuter benefits program, for employees working in an office or a hybrid role, we help support the transportation costs associated with commuting — to health and family benefits programs including fertility, caregiving, childcare, and family forming/planning, as well as emotional and mental health benefits — and, we encourage everyone to find a comfortable work-life balance by offering a take-what-you-need vacation policy.

One example of programs is Cloudflare’s Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), employee-led and company-supported groups of underrepresented and/or marginalized employees. These groups are focused on key Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives with leaders, executives, and members for each group, who join together in the workplace based on shared characteristics, life experiences, or interests. ERGs are generally based on creating a community of support and belonging, enhancing career development of their members, and contributing to the development of a more inclusive culture at Cloudflare. Today we have 16 ERGs at Cloudflare ranging from Proudflare, Womenflare, and Afroflare to Cloudflarents and Mindflare (you get the theme!).

What’s been at the center of how we’ve approached supporting our team these past couple years is flexibility and experimentation. Cloudflare’s workplace shifted from completely in-office since the company’s launch and leading up to March 2020, to then an entirely new remote environment that we hadn’t had before. This has been a big experiment for us, and it’s an honor to be recognized among the top workplaces uplifting its people. We recognize that every team’s needs are different and that most of us want some level of flexibility in how and where we work. At Cloudflare, we support a variety of work environments that give teams the opportunity to establish their own optimal working arrangements. Whether that be hybrid, remote, or in-office that fit with their objectives and enable collaboration — each employee has flexibility.

Cloudflare has grown its global team by 93% over the past two years and has overall prioritized the recruitment, retention, as well as success of employees. To give a sense of this, in 2021 we received more than 200,000 competitive applications, extending 1,455 offers — while seeing a 92% acceptance rate across the board, and alongside continuously low attrition rates.

Now approaching the end-of 2022, we have over 3,100 team members globally. As our co-founder, President & COO Michelle Zatlyn says, “Companies are collections of people. One of the best parts of my job is the people I get to work with.” And we are continuing to hire worldwide with hundreds of open positions across the organization ranging from Sales to Engineering. To learn more about the Cloudflare career opportunities, please check out Cloudflare Careers! And an enormous high-five to the entire Cloudflare team for your continuous effort and hand in helping build a better Internet.

“You can accomplish anything if you do it. Nothing will be accomplished unless you do it. If nothing is not accomplished, that’s because no one did it.“— Yozan Uesugi

Long hours and hard work. If you ask anyone in Japan what our work culture is like, chances are, these are the words that will come to mind. Different countries have their own cultures and also specific work habits and ways of having a work-life balance. The pandemic brought everyone (companies and their people) a new reality, new lessons, and new habits. Here at Cloudflare, our thinking around where and how we do our best work has evolved over the course of the pandemic. We care about addressing the diverse needs of our workforce and our policies and benefits are designed to optimize for their flexibility and needs. To that end, Cloudflare Japan is making a few important changes to our employee benefits:

• “take what you need” time off for all our employees

• 16-week gender-neutral paid parental leave

• flexible working hours

First, let’s try to understand a bit of the Japanese work culture. According to Japan’s labor laws, Japanese employed workers are assumed to work a maximum of 8 hours a day, or 40 hours per week. But ask any employed person in Japan and you will soon discover that people work much longer hours than that. A 2015 study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found that about 22% of Japanese employees work 50 hours or more each week on average, well above 11% in the U.S., and 6% in Spain. On top of that, people are also less likely to take personal time off. While existing labor laws provide every employed person with at least 10 days of annual leave (+1 day for every year of service, usually capped at 20 days), a 2017 General Survey on Working Conditions published by the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare found that on average, people only actually took 8.8 days of annual leave per year.

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic and things started to change. With restrictions put in place, a lot of us had no choice but to work from home, a concept that’s completely foreign to the Japanese work culture. And now two years into the pandemic, there has been a shift in the Japanese way of working. In a recent Zero Trust survey that Cloudflare conducted in Japan, 74% of IT and cybersecurity decision makers said their organization will be implementing a combination of return-to-office and work-from-home. This means that the future of work in Japan is flexible.

While we encourage our teams to always get their work across the finish line, we also appreciate the value and importance of having personal time to be able to spend with loved ones, take up a hobby, or simply for rest and relaxation. We believe that time away from work helps you be better at work. Our time away from work policies are designed for that and reflect the reality that technology has enabled us to be more mobile and flexible in the 21st century.

On parental leave, we strongly believe that parents should have equal opportunity to bond with their new family member, and don’t believe in forcing a parent to designate themselves as a “primary” or “secondary” caregiver. We believe these designations create a false dichotomy that does not reflect the modern family, nor reflect our values of diversity and equality; especially when we know that these designations typically disadvantage the careers of women more than men in the workplace.

Lastly, we remain committed to providing great physical spaces for our employees to work, collaborate, and celebrate in, while they’re in the office. While remote work is currently still the norm, it will be up to teams and individuals to decide what works best for them for the task at hand. People may wish to come into our offices to meet with their colleagues, socialize, or join on-site workshops, but then choose to do their quiet focus time work from home. As such, we just completely redesigned and renovated our offices in San Francisco and London —  starting with these offices with experimentation in-mind and with the purpose of reimagining our other global offices. Our way of working has changed, and as such our spaces should support this shift, to be a place where teams can come together and collaborate most effectively.

Cloudflare has had a longstanding presence in Japan, expanding our network into Tokyo in 2010, just months after launching. Today, we have seven points of presence across four cities, and we also announced our Tokyo office in 2020.

Also, it’s important to mention that in Q4 2021, Cloudflare blocked an average of 1.9 billion attacks per day in Japan. That number has grown to 3.8 billion attacks per day blocked by Cloudflare in Q1 2022, an increase of 100% since the previous quarter.

My goal when I joined Cloudflare almost six months ago remains the same — to help customers in Japan accelerate their digital transformation, that will in turn help improve Japan’s competitiveness in the world. In order to do this, we need to continue to provide a great work environment and build a great team. And we’re just getting started!

We are actively recruiting in Japan and have many open roles across different functions. If you’d like to join us in our mission to help build a better Internet, come talk to us!

I am excited to announce that I have joined Cloudflare as Managing Director for the Middle East and Turkey (MET) region. Having worked in the domain of cyber security for more than two decades, I can see that Cloudflare is genuine in its mission of building a better Internet that is fast, safe and reliable for everyone. Being part of this journey that touches everyone’s life is surely an exciting thing to do, and I look forward to putting my experience in play towards successfully achieving this goal.

Cloudflare has been associated with delivering fast content over cloud in a most reliable and secure manner, accounting for at least 20% of the global Internet traffic. Cloudflare can cater for and support all types of organizations (businesses and public sector) including those with a social mission. The Middle East and Turkey as an emerging market is characterized by a relatively young population, with 70% of it being under the age of 30. This dynamic youth segment has an insatiable demand for both content and knowledge. To that extent, there has been a rapid uptake in Internet use, and digital transformation initiatives have significantly accelerated over the past couple of years; this trend represents an opportunity for Cloudflare to add considerable value to regional enterprises and in doing so, increase its footprint and market share.

Personally, building a regional presence and delivering business growth for global software and technology providers is something that I've always enjoyed doing throughout my career and I look forward to helping Cloudflare successfully establish the right level of presence in this fast-growing and dynamic market.

I join Cloudflare with over two decades of experience, mostly in the cybersecurity and software industry, where over the past years I helped global technology providers establish and expand presence and operation in the emerging markets, particularly in the Middle East and Turkey. Prior to joining Cloudflare, I was the Managing Director and Head of Sales for Emerging Markets at CyberRes, the cybersecurity line of business at MicroFocus, managing the sales and business development across the Middle East, Africa, Brazil, Russia, CIS and CEE. Before that I led StarLink Value Added Distribution as their CEO across a 22 country operation, managing their annual business of close to $500M. In addition, I held several leadership positions at major technology vendors such as Symantec, BlueCoat, Fortinet and CyberGuard.

I enjoy launching operations from inception in the region. Building successful teams that can deliver future incremental growth and objectives and supporting our customers is an exciting challenge. Moreover, the MET region made up of 13 countries with fast-growing and innovation-driven economies presents a unique growth opportunity for Cloudflare to tap into.

I can confidently say that the Middle East and Turkey markets are nowadays at the forefront of technology and early adopters of disruptive technologies such as cloud on a global scale.

This is being driven by many factors such as Digital Transformation where several countries have embraced ambitious programs transforming them into true digital economies. Cloud uptake has accelerated over the past few years in the region and the necessary regulatory frameworks and related compliance policies are now in place to propel enterprises into the next phase of leveraging the benefits of cloud. This transformation is further accelerated as earlier mentioned, by a mostly young and content demanding population-that content being gaming, entertainment, educational, sports or online retail.

The recent pandemic has for sure played a major role in building up this momentum and increasing the urgency in speeding up such a transition.

The parallel increase of cyber threats and associated breaches, puts Cloudflare in an unparalleled and unique position to deliver the required content in a reliable, fast and secure manner to individuals, businesses and public sector alike, elevating the levels of productivity and performance in addition to reducing complexity for users.

To do that, Cloudflare has built a global network and infrastructure across 275 cities around the world with 27 in the MET region, delivering the same connectivity at 50ms performance for more than 95% of customers. The innovation path is stunning. Not only do we provide best in class cyber security solutions with Cloudflare’s SASE security platform, Cloudflare One, a Zero Trust network-as-a-service platform that dynamically connects users to enterprise resources, with identity-based security controls delivered close to users, wherever they are, but we also offer an open strong developer platform with Cloudflare Workers. As we just had our Platform Week, I invite you to check our latest announcements.

Having spoken to so many customers in the region, I understand that nowadays more than ever, they need to be able to grow their operations by focusing on their core mission without having to worry about their technology. Cloudflare appears to me as one of the most innovative customer-centric companies in the market. More than just technology, we are on a mission to help to build a fast, reliable and secure Internet for a maximum number of people, businesses, and public organizations.

I look forward to contributing towards the future of digital transformation in the Middle East and Turkey, while delivering solutions that will support all the innovative projects that are already on their way or in the pipeline.

Cloudflare has an exceptional company culture with key values such as diversity, principle, collaboration, innovation and transparency. One of my goals is to build a successful team through empowering current team members and attracting future talents that would all contribute towards this journey. Therefore, I encourage anyone sharing the same ambitions and interested in joining our winning team to keep track of our new roles by exploring open positions

I am extremely proud to launch our regional base out of Dubai, to be followed by additional regional expansions in the future. Currently, Cloudflare has 27 data centers distributed across major cities in the MET region, and we have plans to add more in the near future such as the Jeddah datacenter recently announced. All this to cope with the growth in demand that we are forecasting and to help us position Cloudflare as the brand of choice in the region.

I joined Cloudflare in March to lead Partnerships & Alliances for Asia Pacific, Japan, and China (APJC). In the last month I’ve been asked many times: “Why Cloudflare?” I’ll be honest, I’ve had opportunities to join other technology companies, but no other organization excited me more than Cloudflare. So I jumped. And I couldn’t be more thrilled for the opportunity to build a strong partner ecosystem for APJC.

When I considered joining Cloudflare, I recall consistently reading the message around “Helping to Build a Better Internet”. At first those words didn’t connect with me, but they sounded like an important mission.

I did my research and read analyst reports to learn about Cloudflare's market position, and then it dawned on me, Cloudflare is leading a transformation. Taking traditional on-premise networking and security hardware and building a transformational cloud-based solution, so customers don’t need to worry about which company supplied their kit. I was excited to learn that Cloudflare customers can simply access the vast global network that has been designed to make everything that customers connect to on the Internet secure, private, fast, and reliable. So hasn’t this been done before? For compute and storage that transformation is almost a commodity now, but for networking and security, Cloudflare is leading that transformation and I want to be part of that.

As I continued to learn more about Cloudflare, I connected with the mission of Project Galileo, Cloudflare's response to cyber attacks launched against important, yet vulnerable groups such as social activists, humanitarian organizations, minority groups and the voices of political dissent, who are repeatedly flooded with malicious cyber attacks in an attempt to take them offline. I was inspired that Cloudflare was part of something beyond a technology transformation. Vulnerable groups and communities who are part of Project Galileo, have access to Cloudflare security services at no cost.

So now that I’m on the inside I shouldn’t be surprised that I continue to find reasons why Cloudflare is the place to work for. Female leadership is well represented, including our President, COO, and co-founder, Michelle Zatlyn, who took the time to meet me during the interview process, and Jen Taylor our Chief Product Officer, whom I met while she was in Sydney meeting customers and partners, gave me a warm welcome.

In my third week in the company, I met a new colleague at a team gathering. We immediately hit it off chatting and getting to know each other. She had built a career in the sports industry which was ripped from under her during the pandemic, where she was one of the many who lost their jobs. What inspired me about her story was how Cloudflare embraced this as an opportunity to bring diverse talent into the company. They opened their virtual arms and doors to offer her an opportunity to build a career. Cloudflare crafted a path that led her into a Business Development role and now into an Associate Solutions Engineer role. Who does that? Cloudflare does, and I’m working with inspiring leaders who are committed to making that happen.

Finally, early in my career I learned the importance of working with Partners. It is important to commit to joint goals, build trust, celebrate success and carry each other through the trenches when things get tough. As a freshly anointed Cloudflare employee, my top priority is to build a strong culture of partnering. Partners are an important extension of our team and through Partners we can provide customers with deeper engagement and expert knowledge on Cloudflare products and services. My initial priority will be to focus on building Zero Trust Partner Practices supporting a significant number of APJC businesses who are planning a Zero Trust strategy, driven by an increase in cyber attacks. This year, we are rolling out sales and technical enablement, in addition to marketing funding to accelerate the ramp up of our Zero Trust partners.

In addition, the team will lean into partnerships who offer professional services and consulting practices that can support customer implementations. Our partners are critical to our joint success, and together we can support customers in their journey through network and security transformation. Finally, I’m excited to share that our co-founders Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn will be in Sydney in September for Cloudflare Connect. I look forward to leveraging that platform to share more detail on the APJC Partnerships strategy and launching the APJC Partner Advisory Board.

The process began for me back when I was taking a software engineering module at NUS where one of my classmates had shared a job post for an internship at Cloudflare. I had known about Cloudflare’s DNS service prior and was really excited to learn more about the internship opportunity because I really resonated with the company's mission to help build a better Internet.

I knew right away that this would be a great opportunity and submitted my application. Soon after, I heard back from the recruiting team and went through the interview process – the entire interview process was extremely accommodating and is definitely the most enjoyable interview experience I have had. Throughout the process, I was constantly asked about the kind of things I would like to work on and the relevance of the work that I would be doing. I felt that this thorough communication carried on throughout the internship and really was a cornerstone of my experience interning at Cloudflare.

My internship began with onboarding and training, and then after, I had discussions with my mentor, Ayush Verma, on the projects we aimed to complete during the internship and the order of objectives. The main issues we wanted to address was the current manual process that our internal teams and partners go through when they want to duplicate the configuration settings on a zone, or when they want to compare one zone to other zones to ensure that there are no misconfigurations. As you can imagine, with the number of different configurations offered on the Cloudflare dashboard for customers, it could take significant time to copy over every setting and rule manually from one zone to another. Additionally, this process, when done manually, poses a potential threat for misconfigurations due to human error. Furthermore, as more and more customers onboard different zones onto Cloudflare, there needs to be a more automated and improved way for them to make these configuration setups.

Initially, we discussed using Terraform as Cloudflare already supports terraform automation. However, this approach would only cater towards customers and users that have more technical resources and, in true Cloudflare spirit, we wanted to keep it simple such that it could be used by any and everyone. Therefore, we decided to leverage the publicly available Cloudflare APIs and create a browser-based application that interacts with these APIs to display configurations and make changes easily from a simple UI.

With the end goal of simplifying the experience for our partners and customers in duplicating zone configurations, we decided to build a Zone Copier web application solely built on Cloudflare Workers. This tool would, in a click of a button, automatically copy over every setting that can be copied from one zone to another, significantly reducing the amount of time and effort required to make the changes.

Alongside the Zone Copier, we would have some auxiliary tools such as a Zone Viewer, and Zone Comparison, where a customer can easily have a full view of their configurations on a single webpage and be able to compare different zones that they use respectively. These other applications improve upon the existing methods through which Cloudflare users can view their zone configurations, and allow for the direct comparison between different zones.

Importantly, these applications are not to replace the Cloudflare Dashboard, but to complement it instead – for deeper dives into a single particular configuration setting, the Cloudflare Dashboard remains the way to go.

To begin building the web application, I spent the first few weeks diving into the publicly available APIs offered by Cloudflare as part of the v4 API to verify the outputs of each endpoint, and the type of data that would be sent as a response from a request. This took much longer than expected as certain endpoints provided different default responses for a zone that has either an empty setting – for example, not having any Firewall Rules created – or uses a nested structure for its relevant response. These different potential responses have to be examined so that when the web application calls the respective API endpoint, the responses are handled appropriately. This process was quite manual as each endpoint had to be verified individually to ensure the output would work seamlessly with the application.

Once I completed my research, I was able to start designing the web application. Building the web application was a very interesting experience as the stack rested solely on Workers, a serverless application platform. My prior experiences building web applications used servers that require the deployment of a server built using Express and Node.js, whereas for my internship project, I completely relied on a backend built using the itty-router library on Workers to interface with the publicly available Cloudflare APIs. I found this extremely exciting as building a serverless application required less overhead compared to setting up a server and deploying it, and using Workers itself has many other added benefits such as zero cold starts. This introduction to serverless technology and my experience deep-diving into the capabilities of Workers has really opened my eyes to the possibilities that Workers as a platform can offer. With Workers, you can deploy any application on Cloudflare’s global network like I did!

For the frontend of the web application, I used React and the Chakra-UI library to build the user interface for which the Zone Viewer, Zone Comparison, and Zone Copier, is based on. The routing between different pages was done using React Router and the application is deployed directly through Workers.

Here is a screenshot of the application:

As developers will know, the best way to obtain feedback for the tool that you’re building is to directly have your customers use them and let you know what they think of your application and the kind of features they want to have built on top of it. Therefore, once we had a prototype version of the web application for the Zone Viewer and Zone Comparison complete, we presented the application to the Solutions Engineering team to hear their thoughts on the impact the tool would have on their work and additional features they would like to see built on the application. I found this process very enriching as they collectively mentioned how impactful the application would be for their work and the value add this project provides to them.

Some interesting feedback and feature requests I received were:

1. The Zone Copier would definitely be very useful for our partners who have to replicate the configuration of one zone to another regularly, and it's definitely going to help make sure there are less human errors in the process of configuring the setups.

2. Besides duplicating configurations from zone-to-zone, could we use this to replicate the configurations from a best-in-class setup for different use cases and allow partners to deploy this with a few clicks?

3. Can we use this tool to generate quarterly reports?

4. The Zone Viewer would be very helpful for us when we produce documentation on a particular zone's configuration as part of a POC report.

5. The Zone Viewer will also give us much deeper insight to better understand the current zone configurations and provide recommendations to improve it.

It was also a very cool experience speaking to the broad Solutions Engineering team as I found that many were very technically inclined and had many valid suggestions for improving the architecture and development of the applications. A special thanks to Edwin Wong for setting up the sharing session with the internal team, and many thanks to Xin Meng, AQ Jiao, Yonggil Choi, Steve Molloy, Kyouhei Hayama, Claire Lim and Jamal Boutkabout for their great insight and suggestions!

While Cloudflare is known for its impeccable transparency throughout the company, and the stellar products it provides in helping make the Internet better, I wanted to take this opportunity to talk about the other endeavors that the company has too.

Cloudflare is part of the Pledge 1%, where the company dedicates 1% of products and 1% of our time to give back to the local communities as well as all the communities we support online around the world.

I took part in one of these activities, where we spent a morning cleaning up parts of the East Coast Park beach, by picking up trash and litter that had been left behind by other park users. Here’s a picture of us from that morning:

From day one, I have been thoroughly impressed by Cloudflare’s commitment to its culture and the effort everyone at Cloudflare puts in to make the company a great place to work and have a positive impact on the surrounding community.

In addition to giving back to the community, other aspects of company culture include having a good team spirit and safe working environment where you feel appreciated and taken care of. At Cloudflare, I have found that everyone is very understanding of work commitments. I faced a few challenges during the internship where I had to spend additional time on university related projects and work, and my manager has always been very supportive and understanding if I required additional time to complete parts of the internship project.

My experience interning at Cloudflare has been extremely positive, and I have seen first hand how transparent the company is with not only its employees but also its customers, and it truly is a great place to work. Cloudflare’s collaborative culture allowed me to access members from different teams, to obtain their thoughts and assistance with certain issues that I faced from time to time. I would not have been able to produce an impactful project without the help of the different brilliant, and motivated, people I worked with across the span of the internship, and I am truly grateful for such a rewarding experience.

We are getting ready to open intern roles for this coming Fall, so we encourage you to visit our careers page frequently, to be up-to-date on all the opportunities we have within our teams.

Marcelo Affonso (VP of Infrastructure Operations) and Rebecca Weekly (VP of Hardware Systems) recently joined our team. Here they share their journey to Cloudflare, what motivated them to join us, and what they are most excited about.

I am thrilled to join Cloudflare and lead our global infrastructure operations. My focus will be building, expanding, optimizing, and accelerating Cloudflare’s fast-growing infrastructure presence around the world.

Recently, I have found myself reflecting on how central the Internet has become to the lives of people all over the world. We use the Internet to work, to connect with families and friends, and to get essential services. Communities, governments, businesses, and cultural institutions now use the Internet as a primary communication and collaboration layer.

But on its own, the Internet wasn’t architected to support that level of use. It needs better security protections, faster and more reliable connectivity, and more support for various privacy preferences. What’s more, those benefits can’t just be available to large businesses. They need to be accessible to a full range of communities, governments, and individuals who now rely on the Internet. And they need to be accessible in various ways to align with people’s diverse needs and priorities.

My own personal and professional experiences make these challenges particularly interesting. On a personal level, I was born in Brazil, immigrated to Canada in my late teens, and I have been very fortunate to live and work in seven different countries across North America, South America, and Europe. In embracing all of that change, I’ve learned the importance of being flexible and adaptable — since an approach that may work in one context or culture, may not be relevant in a different one.

On the professional side, I’ve spent much of my career in logistics operations, supply chain management, and cloud infrastructure — most recently at Amazon. After nearly a decade managing Amazon fulfillment operations across the UK, Italy, and Canada, I shifted to Amazon Web Services. There I supported the organization’s second-largest region globally, delivering operational excellence for a rapidly expanding data center portfolio spanning tens of thousands of computer racks. I’ve found great personal fulfillment in figuring out how to deliver and operate infrastructure and services at a massive scale. So to the broader need I mentioned, creating a safer, faster, more private Internet for the whole world is an absolutely fascinating challenge.

I am extremely grateful for the opportunity I had to participate in the growth and expansion of Amazon. But reflecting on all the Internet's needs and challenges, I realized I wanted in my next role to be able to make a big impact on those areas on the broadest possible scale.

With that in mind, Cloudflare was the obvious — and the most exciting — next step.

Cloudflare is the world's most connected cloud network, providing security, speed, reliability, and privacy to anything connected to the Internet — including websites, APIs, corporate networks, and distributed workforces. Our network sits within 50 milliseconds of 95% of the Internet-connected population globally. We’ve become the most trusted, efficient, and relied-upon network on the Internet. For someone interested in helping support the Internet’s role in our daily lives — and in the exciting logistical challenges which enable all of that — there’s no better place to be.

When I met the Cloudflare team, I was immediately drawn to the incredible pace at which they innovate and operate, as well as to their ambitious goal to help build a better Internet. Cloudflare as a whole is very principled in its approach to democratize technologies and operate with a global mindset and focus on adoption to the latest standards. I found this quite refreshing. Similarly, I appreciated the open communication and transparency culture both within and outside the organization, as well as the desire across the teams to continuously learn and adapt.

In the short time I’ve been here, I’ve already started working on many exciting aspects of our network’s growth. We recently announced the addition of 18 new cities to our network, expanding our scope to over 270 cities globally. We’re also growing the number of Cloudflare Network Interconnect (CNI) locations across the world, to make it even easier for more customers to connect to our network.

In addition, I’m particularly thrilled to work with our team to deploy Cloudflare R2 Storage and to lead the expansion of Cloudflare for Offices, which provides office traffic a direct connection to our network and Cloudflare services.

It’s an honor to join this talented, innovative, and ambitious team and to be part of Cloudflare’s important mission. I feel extremely fortunate to join the company at such a critical period of growth, and I am excited to help Cloudflare — and the Internet as a whole — realize their full potential.

I am overjoyed to join Cloudflare and apply my experience in semiconductor and system design and verification to design the next generation of solutions that will power the Internet.

I have happily spent my whole career in hardware because, to put it simply, integrated chips power the world. I’ve been fortunate to contribute to a variety of problems and use cases, including accelerating gas distribution models, improving graphics chips for gaming systems, validating ASICs targeting infrastructure and application acceleration, and designing transistor CPUs and their systems for operations at hyperscale.

Over the course of that journey, I’ve realized that we are entering the “new golden age of computer architecture” as defined by John Hennessy and David Patterson in their February 2019 address to the Association for Computing Machinery. To summarize their nearly two hour lecture is impossible, but I’ll risk it because it was a major influence on me making the leap to Cloudflare.

Hennessy and Patterson argue that evolving computational efficiency in light of the end of Dennard scaling and the slowing of Moore’s Law requires the industry to address the inherent inefficiencies in general purpose ARM- and x86-based processors. They highlight three opportunities:

1. High-level language performance optimization on existing infrastructure (we have optimized for decades for developer efficiency at the risk of massive inefficiencies in traditional CPU architectures)

2. Domain-specific architectures which yield efficiencies through optimizing parallelism in the hardware for a specific computational domain.

3. The hybrid case of domain-specific languages yielding opportunities for domain specific architectures, in order to accelerate infrastructure efficiency holistically.

When considering my next step, I knew I wanted to help shape Hennessy and Patterson’s “golden age”. That meant being closer to application developers and working hand-in-hand with them to enable a greater architectural optimization than either of us would be able to achieve on our own. The trouble is that such opportunities are increasingly rare. In many companies, hardware and software have been abstracted thanks to the rise of hyperscale cloud providers.

That’s exactly where Cloudflare comes in.

Cloudflare is helping build a better Internet. We’re doing so by combining deep software expertise — i.e., the security, performance, reliability, and privacy services our customers use — with equivalent focus on hardware — i.e. the growth and increasing efficiency of the global network on which those services live. And we’re doing so on the broadest and most inclusive scale possible — serving everyone from large enterprises to mom-and-pop shops, often using open-source software and solutions. This openness has led to us serving over 32 million HTTP requests per second on average — a significant fraction of the entire Internet.

For someone interested in exploring the future of architectural optimization through the intersection of software and hardware, being able to do it with the whole Internet as your sandbox is the ultimate opportunity.

From my experience as the Chairperson of the Open Compute Project Foundation, where we drive hyperscale innovation from the cloud to the edge, I felt great synergy leading the Hardware Systems team here at Cloudflare. Together we are identifying, developing, delivering, and scaling the hardware systems that benefit the entire Internet, and you can bet we will enthusiastically share our findings to help shape the future of this industry.

Come join us in helping build a better Internet. If you want to learn more about working at Cloudflare or explore the many career opportunities we have around the world, check out the links below.

About CloudflareOpen Roles

I’m excited to announce that I recently joined Cloudflare in Japan as Vice-President and Managing Director, to help build and expand our customer, partner base, and presence in Japan. Cloudflare expanded its network in Japan in 2010, just months after launching. Now, 12 years later, Cloudflare is continuing its mission to help build a better Internet in Japan and across the globe, and I’m looking forward to being able to contribute to that mission!

In my 35-year career in the IT industry, I have been fortunate enough to work with some of the biggest technology companies in the world, working in various roles in both sales and technical sides of the business. I consider this one of my biggest strengths. In addition, working in the IT industry has allowed me to acquire industry knowledge across a number of different solutions such as custom development, packaged systems (ERP, CRM), MS Office products, and cloud solutions.

Most recently, I was director of the Enterprise Business Group for Japan at AWS, where I was responsible for all commercial industries such as Manufacturing, Process, Distribution, Retail, Telecommunications, Utility, Media, Service, Pharmaceuticals, among others. Prior to AWS, I was Microsoft's Managing Executive Officer in charge of the Public Sector. In this role, I managed business and strategic relationships with the central government and local government, as well as the healthcare, pharmaceutical, and education industries to help customers accelerate their digital transformation, especially when it comes to their shift to the cloud. In 2005, I joined SAP Japan and spent eight years establishing the partner ecosystem, managing about 250 partners. My last role in SAP was to drive business as a sales leader for three industries (public, utility, and telecommunication). In 1999, I joined IBM to be an initial member of the ERP business unit. At IBM, I got the opportunity to manage large ERP implementations as a Senior Project Manager.

If I look back on my career, I experienced so many things from many dimensions. I started my career as an engineer after I graduated from university. It was the first time I learned what a computer was. I enjoyed my first job as a programmer. I remember how it was a great time for me to learn new things every day since technology was rapidly changing, even in the old days, many, many years ago. I am proud that I have always kept the engineering spirit even after I moved to a sales and management position. After two years as a programmer, I moved to Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and spent 12 years as a Systems Engineer. At that time, DEC decided to establish a new manufacturing facility in Japan to provide better quality for Japanese customers. My mission was to design, develop, and maintain all the application systems required to ensure a smooth and seamless manufacturing process, including master production schedule, manufacturing resource planning, inventory, purchasing, work order, shop floor control, and finally developed an automated warehousing system. My last job in DEC was to implement SAP R/3 as a Japan implementation manager. The Japan implementation team was part of the global SAP implementation project, giving me the opportunity to work in a multinational environment. I really enjoyed working at DEC. It was a truly excellent experience for me.

As I look back on my career, one of the things I consider my strength is that throughout those years I got to experience working on technology and computers — as a customer, as a partner, and as a salesperson. Now 35 years later, I'm finally convinced that my role in a global IT company is to contribute to the digital transformation of our customers as well as the society as a whole in Japan, by being able to share global best practices. I decided to join Cloudflare to help accelerate the digital transformation that will help improve Japan’s competitiveness in the world. I believe we have a lot of opportunities to help companies in Japan in this transformation. I remember the feeling I had when I started my first-ever job. I felt a thrill and great motivation. I have the same feeling now with this excellent opportunity for me to launch my new journey with Cloudflare.

It's often been said that Japan has been slow to adopt digital models, compared to the United States, Europe, and even some countries in Asia. In order to accelerate this digital transformation, the Japanese Government launched a new policy called “Cloud By Default” and subsequently established a Digital Agency in September 2021. There is so much to do, and we are behind. The shift to the cloud has just begun. Businesses are starting to move from on-premise to the cloud, and many organizations are selecting a multi-cloud environment as the next generation platform. Cloudflare has the right solutions, the right people and the right strategy to help Japanese organizations make that shift.

Cloudflare is in a unique position to transform the way we do business by providing security, enhancing the performance of business-critical applications, and eliminating the cost and complexity of managing individual hardware, all within a global cloud platform. Cloudflare’s vast global network, which is one of the fastest on the planet, is trusted by millions of web properties. With direct connections to nearly every service and cloud provider, the Cloudflare network can reach 95% of the world’s population within 50 ms. Cloudflare already has 250 data centers including two Japan sites, Tokyo and Osaka.

Cloudflare is ready to help customers in Japan accelerate their digital transformation and be a trusted solution provider for the Japanese market. I am very much looking forward to contributing to the growth of the business, and the acceleration of the digital transformation for businesses in Japan.

I am excited to announce that I have joined Cloudflare as the Head of Southeast Asia and Korea (SEAK) region to help build a better Internet and to expand Cloudflare’s growing customer, partner and local teams across all the countries in SEAK. Cloudflare is at an emergence phase in this region, with immense growth potential, and this is just the beginning. Cloudflare has had a lot of success globally and our charter is to build on that success and momentum to grow our presence locally to address the demands in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Indochina and Korea. Customer engagements in each of the countries in SEAK presents a unique, rich and fulfilling engagement each with their own intricacies.

I was born in India (Surat, Gujarat), and at the age of four our family moved to Bahrain where we lived for eight years. We then moved to New Zealand, which is where I completed my senior years of high school and also my Bachelor’s Degree in Information Engineering at Massey University. After graduation, we moved to Melbourne, Australia which is our family home and where my career started.

I love meeting and working with diverse and interesting people who bring different views, thoughts and perspectives. The experiences growing up and working in so many countries has made me a more dynamic leader, while working with so many cultures and diverse teams. Diversity is what drives innovation and growth, more so true than ever in this exciting region.

I love my sports (cricket, squash, golf), traveling and spending time with family & friends.

I joined IBM Australia as a graduate in 1997, gaining valuable experiences across many roles from delivery to sales, in a career spanning 15 years. Having been in the IT industry for more than 27 years, career experiences at large global organisations like IBM, SAP, Cisco, NTT and Oracle, all of these amazing organisations and colleagues (many of whom are friends), have provided me with the best set of tools and experiences which I can bring to Cloudflare to help drive the growth agenda.

Below are the main reasons I joined Cloudflare to embark on this amazing journey:

1. Cloudflare’s Growth potential: Cloudflare has an immense growth potential in APJC and subsequently in Southeast Asia & Korea.  In our recently announced Q3 earnings, we reported a 51% year-over-year increase in revenue, with a record addition of 170 large customers.

2. Cloudflare’s ever-growing Portfolio: I was lucky enough to join during Birthday Week, Cloudflare’s 11th birthday. Many new products and solutions were announced during the week to further enhance our growing portfolio of solutions. I am amazed at the pace of innovation, where Cloudflare is continuously releasing new products and features on the Cloud that are then instantly available at all our data centers globally for our clients to consume and adopt.

3. Cloudflare People: During the interview process, I met with 11 Cloudflare colleagues, and all of these felt more like a discussion with a two-way dialogue and a view for Cloudflare to get to know me better, and for me to better understand Cloudflare. This emphasised in my mind the like-minded people I will be working with, where we all work collaboratively, leveraging the experiences we all bring from our past to achieve greater outcomes.

4. Cloudflare Culture: having now met with so many of my colleagues at Cloudflare, the one thing that stands out for me is the humility with which everyone operates from Global and Regional leaders to our local teams. The all-inclusive culture at Cloudflare along with the three tenets of Curious, Transparent and Principled are very much aligned with my personal principles: Honesty, Integrity and Transparency.

It is an exciting time to be joining one the fastest growing Cloud companies in the world and I want to be part of the Cloudflare journey and contribute to the growth agenda.

I am convinced that Cloudflare is and will be an even bigger global IT giant. Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet, by working collaboratively with our customers to make them more secure, providing a high level of performance to support their business critical applications, while reducing cost and the complexity of managing their network infrastructure.

The Southeast Asia and Korea region is such a diverse, dynamic and exciting region to be in, where the potential for growth is limitless. As many as 40 million people in six countries across the region — Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand — came online for the first time in 2020. That pushed the total number of internet users in Southeast Asia to 400 million with some of the biggest ecommerce markets in the world.

Similarly, Korea has the highest internet penetration rate with 96% of its population online. On top of that, the government is investing heavily in its Digital New Deal program, which will focus on development of technologies based on data, networks and AI, as well as a digitization plan that will create job opportunities in a number of industries across the country.

Cloudflare is in a unique position to transform the way business is conducted in this region with its global cloud platform that delivers a broad range of network and security services to businesses of all sizes across all geographies. Coverage across Large Enterprises, Public Sector, Mid-Market, Start-ups to the individual developer: companies of all sizes across all industries are being powered by Cloudflare to provide Security, Performance, and Reliability services.

If you are interested in joining Cloudflare and helping to build a more secure, fast, and reliable Internet, do explore our open roles. We are hiring talented people locally, building and strengthening our local teams across: Strategic / Account Executives, Channel Managers, Business Development Representatives, Strategic / Solution Engineers, Customer Success Managers and more.

It is a great honour and a privilege for me to be part of the Cloudflare family to help build Cloudflare’s future in Southeast Asia and Korea. The potential opportunity is enormous, and we are just getting started.

Feel free to reach out to me at satyen@cloudflare.com.

Cloudflare provides a broad range of products — ranging from security, to performance and serverless compute — which are used by millions of Internet properties worldwide. Often, these products are built by multiple teams in close collaboration and delivering them can be a complex task. So ever wondered how we do so consistently and safely at scale?

Software delivery consists of all the activities to get working software into the hands of customers. It’s usual to talk about software delivery with reference to a model, or framework. These provide the scaffolding for most modern software delivery models, although in order to minimise operational friction it’s usual for a company to tailor their approach to suit their business context and culture.

For example, a company that designs the autopilot systems for passenger aircraft will require very strict tolerances, as a failure could cost hundreds of lives. They would want a different process to a cutting edge tech startup, who may value time to market over system uptime or stability.

Before outlining the approach we use at Cloudflare it’s worth quickly running through a couple of commonly used delivery models.

Waterfall has its foundations (pun intended) in construction and manufacturing. It breaks a project up into phases and presumes that each phase is completed before the next begins. Each phase “cascades” into the next bit like a waterfall, hence the name.

The main criticism of waterfall approaches arises when flaws are discovered downstream, which may necessitate a return to earlier phases — though this can be managed through governance processes that allows for adjusting scope, budgets or timelines.

More recently there are a number of modified waterfall models which have been developed as a response to its perceived inflexibility. Some notable examples are the Rational Unified Process (RUP), which encourages iteration within phases, and Sashimi which provides partial overlap between phases.

Despite falling out of favour in recent years, waterfall still has a place in modern technology companies. It tends to be reserved for projects where the scope and requirements can be defined upfront and are unlikely to change. At Cloudflare, we use it for infrastructure rollouts, for example. It also has a place in very large projects with complex dependencies to manage.

Agile isn’t a single well-defined process, rather a family of approaches which share similar philosophies — those of the agile manifesto. Implementations vary, but most agile flavours tend to share a number of common traits:

• Short release cycles, such that regular feedback (ideally from real users) can be incorporated.

• Teams maintain a prioritized to-do list of upcoming work (often called a ‘backlog’), with the most valuable items are at the top.

• Teams should be self-organizing, and work at a sustainable pace.

• A philosophy of Continuous Improvement, where teams seek to improve their ways of working over time.

Continuous improvement is very much the heart of agile, meaning these approaches are less about nailing down “the correct process” and focus more on regular reflection and change. This means variances between any two teams is expected, and encouraged.

Agile approaches can be divided into two main branches — iterative and flow-based. Scrum is probably the most prevalent of the iterative agile methods. In Scrum a team aims to build shippable increments of code at regular intervals called sprints (or “iterations”). Flow-based approaches on the other hand (such as Kanban) instead pick up new items from their backlog on an ad hoc basis. They use a number of techniques to try and minimise work in progress across the team.

The main differences between the two branches can be typified by looking at two example teams:

• The “Green” Team has a set of products they support and wants to update them regularly, production issues for them are rare and there is very little ad-hoc work. An iterative approach allows them to make long term plans whilst also being able to incorporate feedback from users with some regularity.

• The “Blue” Team meanwhile is an operational team, where a big part of their role is to monitor production systems and investigate issues as they arise. For them, a flow based approach is much more appropriate, so they can update their plans on the fly as new items arise.

Cloudflare comprises dozens of globally distributed engineering teams each with their own unique challenges and contexts. A team usually has an Engineering Manager, a Product Manager and less than 10 engineers, who all focus on a singular product or mission. The DDoS team for example is one such team.

A team that supports a newly released product will likely want to rapidly incorporate feedback from customers, whereas a team that manages shared internal platforms will prize platform stability over speed of innovation. There is a spectrum of different contexts within Cloudflare which makes it impossible to define a single software delivery method for all teams to follow.

Instead, we take a more nuanced approach where we allow teams to decide which methodology they wish to follow within the team, whilst also defining a number of high-level concepts and language that are common to all teams. In other words, we are more concerned with macro-management than micro-management.

At the highest level, our unit of work is called a “SHIP”  — this is a change to a service or product which we intend to ship to customers, hence the name. All live SHIPs are published on our internal roadmap, called our “SHIP-board”. Transparency and collaboration are part of our DNA at Cloudflare, so for us, it’s important that anyone in Cloudflare can view the SHIP-board.

Individual SHIPs are sized such that they can be comfortably delivered within a month or two, though we have a strong preference towards shorter timescales. We’d much rather deliver three small feature sets monthly than one big launch every quarter.

A single SHIP might need work from multiple teams in order for customers to use it. We manage this by ensuring there is an EPIC within the SHIP for each team contributing. To prevent circular dependencies, a SHIP can’t contain another SHIP. SHIPs are owned by their Product Manager, and EPICs are usually owned by an Engineering Manager. We also allow for EPICs to be created that don’t deliver against SHIPs — this is where technical improvement initiatives are typically managed.

Below the level of EPICs we don’t enforce any strict delivery model on teams, though teams will usually link their contributory work to the EPIC for ease of tracking. Teams are free to use whichever delivery framework they wish.

Within the Product Engineering organisation, all Product Managers and Engineering managers meet weekly to discuss progress and blockers of their live SHIPs/EPICs. Due to the number of people involved, this is a very rapid fire meeting facilitated by our automated “SHIP-board”. This has a built-in linter to highlight potential issues, to be updated prior to the meeting. We run through each team one by one, starting with the team with the most outstanding lints.

There’s also a few icons which let us visualise the status of a SHIP or EPIC at a glance. For example, a monkey means the target date for an item moved in the last week. Bananas count the total number of times the date has “slipped”, i.e. changed. A typical fragment of the SHIP-board is shown below.

Planning takes place every quarter. This lets us deliver aggressively, without having to change plans too frequently. It also forces us to make conscious choices about what to include and exclude from a SHIP so that extraneous work is minimised.

About a month before quarter-end, product managers will begin to compile the SHIPs that would deliver the most value to customers. They’ll work with their engineering teams to understand how the work might be done, and what work is required of other teams (e.g. the UI team might need to build a frontend whilst another team builds the API).

The team will likely estimate the work at this stage (though the exact mechanism is left up to them). Where work is required of other teams we’ll also begin to reach out to them, so they can factor it into their work for the quarter, and estimate their effort too. It’s also important at this stage to understand what kind of dependency this is — do we need one piece to fully complete before the other, or can they be done in parallel and integrated towards the end? Usually the latter.

The final aspect of planned work are unlinked EPICs — these are things that don’t necessarily contribute meaningfully to a SHIP, but the team would still like to get them completed. Examples of this are performance improvements, or changes/fixes to backend tooling.

We deliver continuously through the quarter to avoid a scramble of deployment at once, and our target dates will reflect that. We also allow anything delivered in the first two weeks of the following quarter to still count as being on-time — stability of the network is more important than hitting arbitrary dates.

We also take a fairly pragmatic approach towards target dates. A natural part of software delivery is that as we begin to explore the solution space we may uncover additional complexity. As long as we can justify a change of date it’s perfectly acceptable to amend the dates of SHIPs/EPICs to reflect the latest information. The exception to this is where we’ve made an external commitment to deliver something, so changing the delivery dates is subject to greater scrutiny.

You might think that letting teams set their own process might lead to chaos, but in my experience the opposite is true. By allowing teams to define their own methods we are empowering them to make better decisions and understand their own context within Cloudflare. We explicitly define the interfaces we use between teams, and that allows teams the flexibility to do what works best for them.

We don’t go as far as to say “there are no rules”. Last quarter Cloudflare blocked an average of 87 billion cyber threats each day, and in July 2021 we blocked the largest DDoS attack ever recorded. If we have an outage, our customers feel it, and we feel it too. To manage this we have strict, though simple, rules governing how code reaches our data centers. For example, we mandate a minimum number of reviews for each piece of code, and our deployments are phased so that changes are tested on a subset of live traffic, so any issues can be localised.

The main takeaway is to find the right balance between freedom and rules, and appreciate that this may vary for different teams within the organisation. Enforcing an unnecessarily strict process can cause a lot of friction in teams, and that’s a shortcut to losing great people. Our ideal process is one that minimises red tape, such that our team can focus on the hard job of protecting our customers.

Do you want to come and work on advanced technologies where every code push impacts millions of Internet properties? Join our team!