Software Engineer Intern (Winter Spring 2026)

Cloudflare, Inc.

Job Overview

Location

Remote

Job Type

Full-time

Full Job Description

📋 Description

• Join Cloudflare’s award-winning engineering team for a 12- to 16-week, paid Winter-Spring 2026 internship that starts in January and runs through April. You will work 100 % remotely alongside full-time engineers who operate one of the world’s largest edge networks—handling more than 11 % of all Internet requests.
• Own a real, customer-facing feature from design to production. Past interns have shipped rate-limiting rules that now protect millions of sites, built performance analytics dashboards used by Fortune 500 customers, and contributed patches to open-source projects like NGINX and Rustls.
• Collaborate in small, cross-functional squads (typically 3-5 engineers, a PM, and a designer) that iterate weekly. You’ll participate in sprint planning, daily stand-ups, and blameless post-mortems, learning how Cloudflare deploys code to 330 + cities in under 30 seconds.
• Write clean, idiomatic code—mostly in Go, Rust, TypeScript, and Lua—while practicing rigorous code review and automated testing. You’ll push your first pull request during week one and, by the end of the program, have commits running on servers on every continent except Antarctica.
• Instrument and monitor your work with Prometheus, Grafana, and Cloudflare’s own analytics pipeline. You’ll learn how we detect anomalies across 100 TB of daily log data and how to roll back safely using feature flags and canary deploys.
• Tackle gnarly distributed-systems problems: DNS propagation at scale, zero-downtime configuration reloads, and caching strategies that shave milliseconds off global response times. Mentors will guide you through design docs, threat-modeling sessions, and performance benchmarking.
• Contribute to Cloudflare’s open-source footprint. Whether you improve Quiche (our QUIC implementation), extend Wrangler (our CLI for Workers), or add new rules to our Web Application Firewall, your code will be publicly visible and community-reviewed.
• Present your project to the entire Engineering org at Demo Week. Previous interns have seen their features rolled out to 100 % of traffic within days of the presentation, and several have returned as full-time engineers after graduation.
• Engage in weekly Lunch-and-Learns with CTO-level speakers and optional deep-dives on topics like BGP routing, post-quantum cryptography, and edge machine learning. You’ll also receive a $1,000 education stipend for books, courses, or conferences.
• Champion Cloudflare’s culture of inclusivity and transparency. You’ll take part in internal hackathons, affinity-group meetups, and volunteer days—last year’s interns helped translate security documentation into 12 languages for non-profit partners.

🎯 Requirements

• Currently pursuing a BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Math, or a related technical field; must graduate December 2026 or later
• Proficiency in at least one systems language (Go, Rust, C, C++) or one web-facing language (JavaScript/TypeScript, Python); demonstrated through coursework, personal projects, or open-source contributions
• Solid grasp of algorithms, data structures, and computer-networking fundamentals; able to analyze trade-offs between latency, throughput, and resource usage
• Nice-to-have: prior exposure to distributed systems, Linux internals, or cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure); experience with Docker, Kubernetes, or CI/CD pipelines

🏖️ Benefits

• Competitive hourly rate of $45–$55 based on location and experience, with overtime eligibility and bi-weekly pay
• One-time $2,000 home-office stipend for ergonomic chair, monitor, high-speed Internet upgrade, or co-working space membership
• Full medical, dental, and vision coverage from day one, plus mental-health and wellness reimbursements up to $1,200 annually
• Annual travel credit of $3,000 to visit any Cloudflare office or attend tech conferences; includes sponsored trips to San Francisco, London, Singapore, and Austin
• Return-offer pathway: interns who meet performance criteria receive early full-time offers with accelerated equity vesting and a $15,000 signing bonus

Skills & Technologies

Spring

Junior

Remote

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Cloudflare, Inc.

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About Cloudflare, Inc.

Cloudflare operates a global cloud platform that delivers security, performance, and reliability services for websites, applications, and networks. Its edge network spans hundreds of cities, providing DNS, DDoS protection, CDN, firewall, Zero Trust access, serverless compute, and developer tools. Traffic is proxied through Anycast IP addresses, applying threat intelligence and optimization before reaching origin servers. The company serves millions of customers, from individuals to large enterprises, aiming to help build a faster, safer, and more resilient Internet.

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