Available Locations: London, UK
What You’ll Do
- Lead and Mentor: Manage a high‑performing team of kernel and systems engineers, fostering a culture of collaboration‑first and continuous knowledge sharing both internally and with the global open‑source community.
- Own the OS Lifecycle: Oversee the end‑to‑end delivery of the Linux Kernel and core OS components. Your goal is a fully automated continuous‑delivery pipeline that moves from merge to 100% production in less than 30 days.
- Drive Technical Vision: Steer the Cloudflare kernel development roadmap, balancing cutting‑edge features with production stability, security, and performance.
- Upstream Advocacy: Promote a minimal‑patch philosophy by ensuring your team is a top contributor to the Linux Kernel and supporting engineers to become upstream maintainers for critical subsystems.
- Cross‑Functional Collaboration: Act as a consultant to hardware and service teams, helping onboard new hardware and optimize workloads for our OS, while leading a virtual‑team environment that invites any engineer at Cloudflare to contribute to the kernel.
- Innovate Debugging: Tackle seemingly impossible kernel‑level debugging challenges by leading the development of automated systems that collect critical telemetry when a system crashes, even when traditional debuggers cannot run.
- Measure Success: Use DORA metrics and team‑specific capabilities—such as time‑to‑fix a kernel issue and upstream commit volume—to track and improve team impact.
What You’ll Bring
- Systems Leadership: 5+ years of experience managing engineering teams, ideally in low‑level systems, kernel development, or large‑scale infrastructure environments.
- Low‑Level Expertise: A deep understanding of Linux Kernel internals, x86/ARM architecture, and OS design fundamentals, comfortable discussing memory management, schedulers, and network stacks.
- Automation Mindset: Experience building or managing CI/CD pipelines for foundational software and believing that toil is a bug while automation is a feature.
- Open Source Pedigree: A proven track record of engaging with the open‑source community and navigating upstreaming dynamics effectively.
- Operational Empathy: Understanding of the unique challenges of a global reboot‑limited production environment, prioritizing stability, and experience with pre‑production QA and synthetic workload evaluation.
- Strategic Communication: Ability to translate complex kernel‑level obstacles into actionable business insights for stakeholders across the company.
- Resilience: Ability to lead a team through difficult challenges with a pragmatic, solution‑oriented mindset.
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. 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.
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