Research Intern (2024)

About Us

At Cloudflare, we have our eyes set on an ambitious goal: to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world’s largest networks that powers approximately 25 million 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! 

Location(s) Available: US, Portugal, UK, Germany, France, Netherlands, Alberta, Canada, British Columbia, Canada, Ontario, Canada, Ottawa, Canada, Quebec, Canada

About the department

Cloudflare’s Research Team is involved with building the future of Cloudflare by tackling strategic projects that have a large impact on Cloudflare systems and the Internet at large. Our focus is on solving difficult problems that serve our goal of connecting and protecting users, applications, and data, while always making the Internet better.

In our quest to make the Internet better, we frequently find ourselves exploring open problems at the boundaries of current work in scalable security, privacy, and systems, including AI/ML and performance.  We make cutting edge research contributions in-house, as well as in collaboration with academia, Internet standards organizations like the IETF, and more!

Our team includes experts in areas including cryptography, privacy, measurement, cache optimization, and time series analysis.  We seek interns that augment our existing expertise as well as those who are working in broadly related areas.  We are researchers at heart, and we love learning!  While we have a range of potential intern projects prepared, we’re particularly interested in candidates who have found a piece of Cloudflare they would like to improve, and have an idea of what they would like to do. 

More information about Cloudflare's approach to research can be found here.

What you'll do

Cloudflare's Research Team solves difficult problems in security, performance, and privacy at scale. This involves systems engineering, open source software development, protocol design, implementation of primitives, with lots of measurement alongside. We make cutting edge research contributions in-house, as well as in collaboration with academia, Internet standards organizations like the IETF, and more!

Successful candidates will be matched to suitable projects. We also welcome novel proposals and ideas that can help to inform or build a better Internet (in the form of a max 200 word proposal).

Research Program Areas

Cloudflare Research has six current program areas. Candidates whose interest or expertise lie outside one of these areas are also encouraged to apply, particularly if they have a particular, specific interest in an aspect of Cloudflare’s technical stack or operations.

Applied AI/ML 

Machine learning and statistical automation is a valuable toolkit for research across Cloudflare’s products and services.  The AI/ML research team seeks to answers cutting edge questions at the intersection of machine learning and scalable system design to answer questions about fraud, predictive optimization, and distributed learning. 

Internet Infrastructure and Governance

Cloudflare Research is dedicated to the health of the broader Internet, including significant work with standards bodies (IETF, W3C, NIST, e.g.) and open implementations.  This program explores ways to improve the underlying infrastructure of the Internet and promote its fair and equitable governance.  This umbrella also includes decentralized web technologies and protocols such as IPFS and Web3.  Example project areas include Internet routing security and resilience (e.g., RPKI, BGP), DNS and domain name security improvements, and addressing the global digital divide.

Measurement and Perfo