Senior Machine Learning Engineer

Skills this role screens for

The company

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: Austin, TX | New York, NY | San Francisco, CA or London, UK (Hybrid)

The work

About the Role

You’ll help define how machine learning models run across Cloudflare’s global network, from frontier open LLMs and real-time voice models to customer-deployed models served on heterogeneous GPUs and next-generation accelerators. You’ll work with systems engineers, product teams, hardware partners, and AI/ML engineers to bring models into production with low latency, strong reliability, and efficient resource use. This role combines applied ML, inference optimization, evaluation, and production engineering, with a focus on benchmarking models, improving serving performance, validating quality, and building tooling that helps Cloudflare and its customers ship AI applications at Internet scale.

The work

Responsibilities

Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience

• Develop, optimize, and productionize machine learning models for Cloudflare’s serverless inference platform, with a focus on performance, reliability, and model quality.
• Build benchmarking and evaluation frameworks to measure latency, throughput, cost efficiency, and model behavior across LLMs, speech, vision, and other model families.
• Improve inference performance through quantization, batching, caching, model compilation, runtime tuning, and accelerator-aware optimization.
• Partner with systems engineers to integrate models into Cloudflare’s distributed inference infrastructure across a heterogeneous fleet of GPUs and next-generation accelerators.
• Drive improvements to model deployment workflows, including validation, rollout safety, observability, regression testing, and operational readiness.
• Collaborate with product and engineering teams to translate customer requirements into scalable ML capabilities for Workers AI.
• Mentor engineers, contribute to technical direction, and raise the quality bar for production ML engineering practices across the team.
• Experience building, optimizing, and operating machine learning models in production environments.
• Strong proficiency with Python and modern ML frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX, or equivalent.
• Hands-on experience with inference optimization techniques for large-scale models, including quantization, batching, caching, compilation, and serving runtime tuning.
• Experience with large-scale inference serving frameworks or runtimes such as SGLang, vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, ONNX Runtime, Triton, llama.cpp, or similar.
• Familiarity with LLMs, speech models, vision models, embeddings, multimodal models, retrieval-augmented generation, or other modern deep learning architectures.
• Experience optimizing models for GPUs or specialized accelerators.
• Strong understanding of production ML concerns, including evaluation, monitoring, model regressions, rollout safety, and reliability.
• Ability to work across ML and systems boundaries, including familiarity with distributed systems, networking, or serverless platforms.
• Track record of leading complex technical projects and mentoring other engineers.

Nice to have

Bonus Points

• Experience contributing to open source ML tooling, model serving frameworks, or inference runtimes.

What you get

Compensation

Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.

Equity

This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan.

• For Bay Area based hires: Estimated annual salary of $194,000 - $266,000
• For New York City, New Jersey, Washington, Washington DC, and California (excluding Bay Area) based hires: Estimated annual salary of $185,000 - $254,000

What you get

Benefits

Cloudflare offers a complete package of benefits and programs to support you and your family. Our benefits programs can help you pay health care expenses, support caregiving, build capital for the future and make life a little easier and fun! The below is a description of our benefits for employees in the United States, and benefits may vary for employees based outside the U.S.

What you get

Health & Welfare Benefits

• Medical/Rx Insurance
• Dental Insurance
• Vision Insurance
• Flexible Spending Accounts
• Commuter Spending Accounts
• Fertility & Family Forming Benefits
• On-demand mental health support and Employee Assistance Program
• Global Travel Medical Insurance

What you get

Financial Benefits

• Short and Long Term Disability Insurance
• Life & Accident Insurance
• 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan
• Employee Stock Participation Plan

Also

Time Off

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.…

• Flexible paid time off covering vacation and sick leave
• Leave programs, including parental, pregnancy health, medical, and bereavement leave