The role
About Us
At Cloudflare, we are on a mission to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world’s largest networks that powers millions of websites and other Internet properties for customers ranging from individual bloggers to SMBs to Fortune 500 companies. Cloudflare protects and accelerates any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. Internet properties powered by Cloudflare all have web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with every request. As a result, they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. Cloudflare was named to Entrepreneur Magazine’s Top Company Cultures list and ranked among the World’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company.
At Cloudflare, we’re not looking for people who wait for a polished roadmap; we’re looking for the builders who see the cracks in the Internet that everyone else has simply learned to live with. We value candidates who have the instinct to spot a "normalized" problem and the AI-native curiosity to create a solution using the latest tools. Our culture is built on iteration, leveraging AI to ship faster today to make it better tomorrow, while ensuring that every improvement, no matter how small, is shared across the team to lift everyone up. If you’re the type of person who values curiosity over bureaucracy, and that AI is a partner in solving tough problems to keep the Internet moving forward, you’ll fit right in.
Available Locations: Lisbon, Portugal
Role Summary
Cloudflare MCP Server Portals give organizations a secure, centralized way to connect AI agents to internal and third-party tools. As a Systems Engineer on the MCP Portals team, you will build and operate the distributed systems that authenticate users, manage OAuth credentials and sessions, enforce Zero Trust policies, and proxy MCP traffic across Cloudflare's global network. You will work with engineers and product managers across Access, Gateway, and Developer Platform teams to advance a rapidly evolving protocol and product. We are looking for a thoughtful engineer who enjoys solving ambiguous systems problems and taking responsibility for services in production.
Role Responsibilities
- Design, build, and operate the globally distributed services that connect MCP clients to authorized upstream MCP servers.
- Evolve our implementation as the MCP specification changes.
- Build secure authentication and authorization flows involving Cloudflare Access, OAuth, identity, and delegated access to upstream services.
- Improve the reliability, scalability, latency, and resource efficiency of multi-tenant systems built on the Cloudflare Developer Platform.
- Develop observability through structured logs, metrics, traces, dashboards, and actionable alerts, and participate in production support and incident response.
- Investigate customer issues across multiple services and teams, distinguishing product defects from upstream failures, policy configuration, and infrastructure dependencies.
- Collaborate with product, security, and engineering partners to turn customer needs and emerging standards into well-tested, maintainable product capabilities.
Role Requirements
Must Have Skills
- Experience building and operating reliable distributed systems, backend services, network services, or infrastructure products in production.
- Strong programming skills in TypeScript, JavaScript, Go, Rust, C++, or another systems-oriented language.
- A solid understanding of HTTP, APIs, proxies, streaming connections, and common distributed-systems failure modes.
- Experience debugging production systems using logs, metrics, traces, error reporting, and customer-provided evidence.
- Ability to reason carefully about security boundaries, credential handling, concurrency, state management, and backward-compatible deployments.
- Clear written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to coordinate investigations and solutions across team boundaries.
Applicants should provide a resume or CV describing relevant engineering and operational experience.
Nice to Have Skills
- Experience with authentication and authorization technologies such as OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, JWTs, PKCE, or policy-based access control.
- Experience with the Model Context Protocol or other rapidly evolving application protocols. Prior MCP experience is helpful but not required.
- Familiarity with the Cloudflare Developer Platform, or other serverless edge-computing platforms.
- Experience building gateways, forward proxies, identity systems, developer platforms, or Zero Trust and data loss prevention products.
Compensation
Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.
- For Bay Area based hires: Estimated annual salary of €45,000-62,000
Equity
This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan.
What Makes Cloudflare Special?
We’re not just a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company. We’re a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company with a soul. Fundamental to our mission to help build a better Internet is protecting the free and open Internet.
Project Galileo: Since 2014, we've equipped more than 2,400 journalism and civil society organizations in 111 countries with powerful tools to defend themselves against attacks that would otherwise censor their work, technology already used by Cloudflare’s enterprise customers--at no cost.
Athenian Project: In 2017, we created the Athenian Project to ensure that state and local governments have the highest level of protection and reliability for free, so that their constituents have access to election information and voter registration. Since the project, we've provided services to more than 425 local government election websites in 33 states.
1.1.1.1: We released 1.1.1.1 to help fix the foundation of the Internet by building a faster, more secure and privacy-centric public DNS resolver. This is available publicly for everyone to use - it is the first consumer-focused service Cloudflare has ever released. Here’s the deal - we don’t store client IP addresses never, ever. We will continue to abide by our privacy commitment and ensure that no user data is sold to advertisers or used to target consumers.
Sound like something you’d like to be a part of? We’d love to hear from you!
Please note that applicants who progress to the offer stage of the interview process may be asked to attend an in-person interview within one of the Cloudflare Offices or Cloudflare Hubs. More details about this will be available at that stage of the interview process.
This position may require access to information protected under U.S. export control laws, including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations. Please note that any offer of employment may be conditioned on your authorization to receive software or technology controlled under these U.S. export laws without sponsorship for an export license.
Cloudflare is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunity for all people and place great value in both diversity and inclusiveness. All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to their, or any other person's, perceived or actual race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, family care status, or any other basis protected by law. We are an AA/Veterans/Disabled Employer.
Cloudflare provides reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities. Please tell us if you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job. Examples of reasonable accommodations include, but are not limited to, changing the application process, providing documents in an alternate format, using a sign language interpreter, or using specialized equipment. If you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job, please contact us via e-mail at hr@cloudflare.com or via mail at 101 Townsend St. San Francisco, CA 94107.