Engineering Manager, Rulesets

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. 

We realize people do not fit into neat boxes. We are looking for curious and empathetic individuals who are committed to developing themselves and learning new skills, and we are ready to help you do that. We cannot complete our mission without building a diverse and inclusive team. We hire the best people based on an evaluation of their potential and support them throughout their time at Cloudflare. Come join us! 

Available Location: London, UK

Role Summary

Lead and line-manage a small team of engineers responsible for a core part of the Cloudflare platform - the rulesets system. This is a performance and security sensitive system which provides facilities for selecting traffic and applying actions to that traffic. The system handles tens of millions of requests per second and supports over 20 product teams across the whole range of Cloudflare’s product offerings.

You will guide the career growth of the team members, and ensure we have the right skills and behaviours in the team. You will need to identify high level strategies to meet the needs of the company, and apply those to balance short and long term priorities for the team.

It also involves building relationships with teams across the company, to identify their needs and support them in building products for customers. You will also be involved in direct product development for customers, working closely with our product, support and customer facing teams.

Role Responsibilities

• Prioritise short and long term tasks to balance the immediate needs and long term strategic goals of the company.
• Support and guide the career growth of the team.
• Hire new team members.
• Ensure quality of engineering.
• Participate in our incident management process.
• Organise the team to provide effective 24/7 escalation support for the system in case of critical incidents.

This is not a hands-on engineering role; you will not be writing code. However, you will need to guide the team to make appropriate engineering and architectural decisions, which requires strong technical skills.

Role Requirements (Must-Have Skills)

• Minimum 2 years experience in engineering management.
• Significant experience as a hands-on engineer.
• Excellent at planning, creating teams and overseeing execution to meet commitments and deliver with predictability.
• Experience of managing multiple concurrent projects with competing priorities.
• Track record of managing a diverse team including hiring, onboarding, and professional development. You inspire your team to reach higher and to get there by collaborating. You’re as good at explaining “why” as you are “how”.
• Working with other managers, maintaining clear lines of communication across and upwards in an organisation.

Nice-to-Have Skills

• Experience of operating high performance and large scale software systems.
• Customer focussed experience - managing difficult conversations with customers.

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 r