Performance Engineer, Kernel and Memory
Hybrid · Austin, TX · New York, NY · Washington, DC · Hybrid · Posted Oct 5, 2026
At a glance
- Workplace
- Hybrid
- Location
- Hybrid · Austin, TX · New York, NY · Washington, DC
About Cloudflare
- 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, US
- - New York, NY
- - Washington DC
About the role
- The Performance Team owns overall system and application performance across Cloudflare's fleet, focusing on resource optimization, instrumentation, and tooling.
- This role involves optimizing memory efficiency in the Linux kernel memory-management subsystem to improve performance, latency, and cost at global scale.
Responsibilities
- Diagnose and fix performance and scalability bottlenecks in the Linux kernel memory-management subsystem, informed by real production telemetry at a scale few environments can offer.
- Land your work upstream, keeping up maintainership and review work that earns standing in the community.
- Build and extend low-overhead kernel instrumentation (tracepoints, BPF, perf) so we keep measuring before we change, and prove the impact afterwards.
- Partner with kernel, networking, storage, and product engineers across the company to turn observed system behavior into concrete MM improvements.
- Set technical direction for how Cloudflare uses, tunes, and evolves kernel memory management as we push utilization higher.
Requirements
- Deep expertise in the Linux kernel memory-management subsystem: the page allocator, virtual memory and memory mapping, reclaim, and the locking and concurrency that hold it together.
- A track record of upstream Linux contribution, ideally including maintainership or sustained work in MM or an adjacent subsystem.
- Strong systems programming in C, with the judgement to make high-risk changes to shared infrastructure safely.
- Ability to dive deep into a complex codebase while keeping the fleet-wide picture in mind, and to own a problem and its outcome rather than a single patch.
- Clear communication with engineers across many teams, since the symptoms of an MM problem usually show up far from the MM code.
Preferred qualifications
- Strong understanding of Linux kernel internals pertaining to memory management
- Experience troubleshooting and resolving performance issues in large-scale distributed systems.
- Experience with large scale configuration/deployment management.
Skills
- Linux Kernel
- C
- BPF
- Perf
