Principal Software Engineer, Identity Access Management

Available Locations: Hybrid - Austin
About the Department
Cloudflare's Engineering Team builds and runs the software that handles large volumes of HTTP requests on the Internet today. We also build and run the internal tools that power our software. Within this organization, the Identity and Access Management (IAM) team is the foundation of our Control Plane. We are responsible for the security, scalability, and reliability of how every customer and internal service interacts with the Cloudflare ecosystem.
What You'll Do
As a Principal Engineer, you will be the technical north star for our IAM and Control Plane strategy. Your role transcends individual features; you will be responsible for the long-term health and architectural evolution of our identity systems.

• Architectural Leadership: Lead the design and evolution of high-throughput, low-latency IAM systems that power both customer-facing and internal service APIs.
• Technical Strategy: Define the roadmap for migrating or scaling our legacy authentication and authorization systems into modern, distributed architectures.
• Cross-Functional Influence: Work closely with Product, Security, and UX teams to translate complex business requirements into robust, secure technical specifications.
• Mentorship & Excellence: Set the standard for engineering excellence through deep code reviews, technical design documents, and mentoring senior engineers.
• Operational Stewardship: Oversee the reliability of a platform under constant load, ensuring observability and resilience are baked into the core of the system.

Required Experience (Must-Have Skills)

• Extensive Experience: 10+ years of professional experience building and managing software applications at a massive scale (with at least 5 years at a Senior or Staff level).
• Identity Domain Expertise: Deep understanding of IAM protocols (OAuth2, OIDC, SAML), RBAC/ABAC models, and the security implications of session management at the edge.
• Distributed Systems Mastery: Proven track record in designing, architecting, and debugging large-scale distributed systems that handle global traffic.
• Language Proficiency: Deep knowledge of Go (our primary backend language), though expertise in TypeScript, Rust, C++, or similar is highly valued.
• Database & Storage: Expert-level knowledge of relational databases (PostgreSQL) and distributed caching/storage strategies.
• API Stewardship: Significant experience designing and versioning public-facing APIs that are used by millions of developers.

Desirable Skills & Experience

• Cloudflare Ecosystem: Experience building on Cloudflare Workers or similar serverless/edge computing environments.
• Observability Advocate: A passion for building "observable" systems using Prometheus, Grafana, and Kibana to proactively identify failures.
• Infrastructure as Code: Experience with modern containerized deployment (Docker & Kubernetes), Terraform, and infrastructure automation.
• Security Mindset: A background in security engineering or formal verification of protocol implementations.
• Strategic Delivery: A history of leading multi-quarter projects from conception to global rollout in partnership with product owners.