Senior Response Engineer at Cloudflare

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 Locations: Bengaluru, India

About the Role

The Senior Response Engineer - CMDC serves as a high-tier technical lead within the proactive security team. This position is built for a practitioner who thrives at the intersection of deep protocol-level investigation and strategic technical partnership. The role is responsible for architecting responses to sophisticated threats across OSI Layers 3, 4, and 7, ensuring global customers remain resilient against large-scale DDoS attacks and complex application-layer anomalies.

Acting as a primary technical anchor, this individual provides advanced assistance and strategic intelligence across Cloudflare’s most sophisticated customer environments. This involves deep mastery of the full security stack from Magic Transit (Infrastructure Protection), Advanced TCP/DNS Protection, and Magic Firewall, to application-layer defenses including the WAF, Bot Management, API Security, and Rate Limiting. The role focuses on:

Technical Mentorship: Elevating the team’s collective skill set by acting as a "player-coach," providing hands-on technical guidance during live incidents and reviewing complex mitigation strategies.

Deep-Dive Investigation: Analyzing threats using advanced internal telemetry and dashboards to engineer informed mitigation strategies, often implementing these directly on the edge for mission-critical customer traffic.

Infrastructure & Tooling Evolution: Partnering closely with Product and Engineering teams to transform real-world attack data into automated defenses and enhanced platform capabilities.

Strategic Technical Communication: Serving as the authoritative technical voice during active attacks, providing clarity and architectural guidance to stakeholders.

The ideal candidate would move beyond following runbooks to creating them, transforming raw security telemetry into actionable mitigation strategies and automated defenses.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Escalation: Acting as the technical authority for the CMDC during complex security incidents, providing hands-on intervention when standard protocols are exceeded.

Technical Coaching: Mentoring the CMDC team on advanced traffic analysis and security best practices, ensuring a high technical bar across the CMDC.

Incident Architecture: Leading the technical response to large-scale, sophisticated threats (e.g., volumetric DDoS and protocol-based attacks) and validating the efficacy of mitigation rules.

Technical Communications: Driving high-touch technical dialogue with customer engineering teams during critical incidents, translating complex attack data into actionable architectural advice.

Operational Engineering: Designing and refining technical CMDC workflows, playbooks, and alerting thresholds to improve the team's detection and response capabilities.

Forensics & Analysis: Utilizing internal telemetry, GraphQL, and specialized monitoring tools to perform deep-dive forensics on novel attack vectors.

Qualifications

Experience: A minimum of 8 years of relevant hands-on experience in a Security Operations, Infrastructure Security, or a highly technical incident response environment.

Protocol Sovereignty: A profound understanding of internet protocols (TCP/IP, UDP, ICMP, BGP, and GRE) and the ability to deconstruct anycast traffic flows.

Security Mastery: Proven ability to mitigate complex attacks (e.g., volumetric DDoS, slowloris, SQLi, and Credential Stuffing) using edge-based security controls.

Tooling & Automation: Proficiency in Python, Go, or Bash to automate security workflows and integrate security monitoring tools via APIs.

Technical Writing: The ability to produce high-fidelity Root Cause Analysis (RCA) reports and technical briefings for sophisticated engineering audiences.

System Literacy: Experience with Prometheus/Grafana monitoring and querying large datasets via GraphQL or similar APIs to operationalize contextual security data.

Certifications: Advanced security credentials such as CISSP, CISM, or GIAC (GCIH, GCIA) are highly valued.

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!

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.

Senior Response Engineer

Job Description

Key Responsibilities