Available Locations: Lisbon, Portugal
About the Department
Emerging Technologies & Incubation (ETI) is where new and bold products are built and released within Cloudflare. Rather than being constrained by the structures which make Cloudflare a hugely successful business, we are able to leverage them to deliver entirely new tools and products to our customers. Cloudflare’s edge and network make it possible to solve problems at massive scale and efficiency which would be impossible for almost any other organization.
About the Team
We build products at the intersection of AI, search and retrieval, data insights, and product engineering.
As AI agents change how people discover and interact with the Internet, new problems are emerging around how content is found, understood, retrieved, and kept current. Cloudflare is uniquely positioned to help website owners make their content discoverable and to help agents find relevant, trustworthy information across our network. Building these capabilities requires solving problems across distributed systems, crawling, content ingestion, indexing, retrieval quality, developer experience, and reliable product delivery.
Cloudflare also has a unique perspective on how the Internet is changing. Our global network observes signals that can help us understand trends, identify when content changes, and measure the pulse of the Internet. Used responsibly, these signals could improve existing products, help customers and AI companies find fresher and more relevant information, and create entirely new capabilities and products. The opportunity is broad and still evolving. We need to deliver excellent products today while continuing to identify the problems Cloudflare is uniquely positioned to solve next.
We are a tight-knit group that communicates and collaborates regularly. We celebrate our achievements, support each other when we make mistakes, and hold each other and our work to a high standard.
About the role
We are looking for an Engineering Manager to lead engineering across some of our AI and Internet Data Insights portfolio.
You will be responsible for the people, execution, and engineering quality behind products that help customers make their content discoverable and turn complex Internet signals into useful experiences. You will partner closely with Product Management and engineering teams across Cloudflare to deliver current priorities and shape future opportunities. This is a management role for someone who is deeply technically credible. You will not be expected to write most of the code, but you should be able to understand the systems your engineers operate, challenge architectural decisions, ask the right questions when something is going wrong, and step into a technical problem when the situation calls for it.
At the same time, we are looking for a manager, not a tech lead with direct reports. Your success will be measured by the quality and output of the team you build, the engineers you develop, and the systems and products they deliver.
This role may require flexibility to be on-call outside of standard working hours to address technical issues as needed.
What you'll do
Manage, coach, and grow engineers working across AI-powered search, Internet data insights, and customer-facing products.
Own execution by establishing clear priorities, creating predictable delivery, and giving engineers the context and autonomy to own meaningful areas of the product.
Lead the development of search and retrieval capabilities that help people and AI agents find relevant, trustworthy, and current content.
Partner closely with Product Management to understand customer problems, shape the roadmap, and turn broad opportunities into clear engineering outcomes.
Help identify how signals from Cloudflare's global network can produce useful and trustworthy insights for customers, partners, and other Cloudflare products.
Explore where Cloudflare's unique view of Internet activity can improve content discovery, enable new product experiences, or support entirely new products.
Balance near-term product delivery with thoughtful technical investments that allow promising ideas to grow.
Own the operational health of the systems in your area, including observability, incident response, data and search quality, and long-term reliability.
Develop technical leaders and create space for engineers to lead architecture and implementation.
Responsibilities
We want you to love it here. This role is a great fit for you if
You have led and developed high-performing engineering team(s) and can point to what that team shipped and how the people on it grew.
You are technically credible with experienced engineers. You can review a design, understand the trade-offs in a distributed system or data platform, and recognize when a technical problem needs deeper investigation.
You are comfortable managing a team working across several related technical areas and can create clarity without requiring every problem to fit neatly into a single box.
You care deeply about reliability and quality, particularly when the output of a system is data that people use to understand the Internet.
You have strong product judgment and enjoy working with Product Management to decide what is worth building, what needs improvement and what should not be built at all.
You are comfortable with ambiguity and with finding structure in areas where the opportunity is clearer than the roadmap.
You communicate clearly, give direct feedback, and can explain complex technical decisions to both engineers and non-engineers.
Examples of Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience
Strong technical grounding in distributed systems, search systems, data-intensive systems, Internet infrastructure, or adjacent areas.
Experience building or operating products involving crawling, content ingestion, indexing, retrieval, analytics, or large-scale data processing.
Experience operating systems where correctness, reliability, and quality matter as much as feature delivery.
A track record of hiring, developing, and retaining strong engineers.
Experience partnering closely with Product Management to shape and execute a roadmap.
Experience taking products or major capabilities from an ambiguous opportunity to a clear customer outcome.
Strong written and verbal communication.
Bonus Points
Familiarity with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which combines information retrieval with generative AI to produce answers grounded in selected source material.
Experience building products for AI developers, AI agents, publishers, or content-heavy websites.
Experience working with large-scale telemetry or Internet-scale datasets.
Experience turning complex underlying systems or data into useful products for a broad audience.
Familiarity with Cloudflare Radar, Internet measurement research, or the broader ecosystem of tools used to understand Internet performance, availability and security.
Compensation
For Portugal based hires: Estimated annual salary of €74,000 - €111,000
The final offer will be inclusive of time exemption, in alignment with the applicable law and collective bargaining agreements.
Equity
This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan.
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. 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.
