Senior Response Engineer - Cloudflare Managed Defense Center (CMDC)

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.

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: London, United Kingdom

About The Department

Cloudforce One

is Cloudflare's threat operations and research team, responsible for identifying and disrupting cyber threats ranging from sophisticated cyber criminal activity to nation-state sponsored advanced persistent threats (APTs). Cloudforce One works in close partnership with external organizations and internal Cloudflare teams, continuously developing operational tradecraft and expanding ever-growing sources of threat intelligence to enable expedited threat hunting and remediation.

Members of Cloudforce One are at the helm of leveraging an incredibly vast and varied set of data points that only one of the world's largest global networks can provide. The team analyzes these unique data points at massive scale and efficiency, synthesizing findings into actionable threat intelligence to better protect our customers.

About Interdict

I.N.T.E.R.D.I.C.T.

(Identify, Neutralize, Triage, Engage, Respond, Disrupt, Integrate, Contain, Threat Hunting) is Cloudforce One's unified operational security organization responsible for identifying, analyzing, and responding to threats targeting Cloudflare and its customers. INTERDICT encompasses three main sub-functions:

Phishguard

Email Managed Detection and Response (MDR) service.

Cloudflare Managed Defense (cmd)

24/7 monitoring, detection, and mitigation of security events across Cloudflare products.

Detection Engineering

Develops, maintains, and deploys Cloudflare’s threat detection logic across email, application, and network telemetry.

Through the combined capabilities of CMD, PhishGuard, and Detection Engineering, INTERDICT delivers a cohesive operational security function that provides continuous, proactive protection against network, application, and email-based threats. This integrated structure ensures rapid detection, coordinated response, and improved security outcomes for Cloudflare and its customers.

About The Role

The

Senior Response Engineer

(Network Security focused) within the Cloudflare Managed Defense Center (CMDC) serves as a core technical specialist within the proactive security team. This position is built for a network security practitioner who thrives at the intersection of deep routing protocol investigation, edge-network defense, and strategic technical partnership. The role is responsible for architecting responses to sophisticated infrastructure threats across OSI Layers 3, 4, and 7, ensuring global customers remain resilient against large-scale volumetric DDoS attacks and complex network-layer anomalies.

What You'll Do

Acting as a primary technical anchor for network defense, you will provide advanced assistance and strategic intelligence across Cloudflare’s most sophisticated customer environments. This involves deep mastery of infrastructure protection components (spanning Cloudflare’s native services or industry-equivalent solutions), including BGP routing and advertisement control (managing prefix advertisement and de-advertisement), network protection like Magic Transit, IPFLOW-based Magic Network Monitoring, Advanced TCP/UDP protection, DDoS mitigation rulesets, firewall configurations, Layer 4 proxies such as Spectrum, DNS Firewall, and connectivity troubleshooting over GRE, IPsec, and CNI. A working knowledge of application security (including CDN technology and Web Application Firewalls) will allow you to extend support across broader Managed Defense activities.

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 & Mitigation

Analyzing infrastructure threats using advanced internal telemetry to engineer informed mitigation strategies—specifically focusing on DDoS vectors, BGP routing anomalies, and GRE encapsulation issues—implementing defenses directly on the edge for mission-critical traffic.

Detection Engineering & Tuning

Continuously designing and refining detection mechanisms, security controls, and alerting thresholds to ensure highly accurate, rapid identification of sophisticated network attacks with minimal false positives.

Infrastructure & Tooling Evolution (ai-driven)

Partnering closely with Product, Engineering, and AI teams to transform real-world DDoS attack data into AI-powered automated network defenses, dynamic mitigation models, and enhanced platform capabilities.

Strategic Technical Communication

Serving as an authoritative technical voice during active volumetric attacks, providing clarity and architectural routing guidance to both internal stakeholders and external customer engineering teams.

The ideal candidate moves beyond following static runbooks to engineering AI-assisted response workflows, transforming raw network flow telemetry into actionable mitigation strategies, tuned detections, and intelligent, automated edge defenses.

Responsibilities

Technical Escalation & Response

Acting as a subject matter expert for the Managed Defense Center during complex network security incidents, providing hands-on intervention for large-scale volumetric and protocol-based DDoS attacks when standard protocols are exceeded.

Incident Architecture

Leading the technical response to sophisticated infrastructure threats, validating the efficacy of network mitigation rules, and ensuring stable, clean traffic delivery via BGP and GRE mechanisms.

Detection Engineering

Designing, deploying, and tuning network attack detection logic, utilizing attack telemetry to stay consistently ahead of evolving DDoS methodologies and adversary tactics.

Technical Communications

Driving high-touch technical dialogue with customer network teams during critical incidents, translating complex routing and attack flow data into actionable architectural advice.

Operational Engineering & Ai Integration

Designing and refining technical Managed Defense workflows, building AI-driven automated troubleshooting playbooks (particularly around BGP/GRE), and tuning alerting thresholds to create self-healing infrastructure responses.

Forensics & Analysis

Utilizing internal telemetry, flow data, and specialized monitoring tools to perform deep-dive forensics on novel network attack vectors.

Technical Coaching

Mentoring the Managed Defense team on advanced traffic analysis and security best practices, ensuring a high technical bar across the Managed Defense Center.

Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience:

Experience

: A minimum of 8+ years of relevant hands-on experience specifically within the DDoS mitigation industry, Network Security Operations, or a highly technical infrastructure incident response environment.

Protocol Sovereignty

A profound understanding of internet routing and encapsulation protocols. Expert-level knowledge of BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) and GRE (Generic Routing Encapsulation) reinjection, along with a deep ability to deconstruct TCP/IP, UDP, and ICMP traffic flows.

Security Mastery

Proven ability to identify common network attacks and design robust mitigation strategies for complex volumetric DDoS, UDP/TCP based, and protocol exhaustion using edge-based security controls.

Detection & Tuning

Demonstrated expertise in detection engineering, including the continuous tuning of network security rules and alerts to optimize defense efficacy and operational signal-to-noise ratios.

Ai Tooling & Automation

Proficiency in Python, Go, or Bash to automate network security workflows, with demonstrated experience leveraging AI/ML models or LLM APIs to build automated troubleshooting diagnostics and dynamic threat mitigations.

System Literacy

Experience with monitoring platforms (e.g., Prometheus/Grafana) and querying large network datasets to operationalize contextual routing and security data.

Certifications

Advanced networking and network security credentials such as Cisco CCNP, CCNP Security, or CCIE 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 th