Cloudflare

Internet Infrastructure & Security — CDN, DDoS Protection, Edge Computing, Workers AI

The consensus on Cloudflare: Choose Cloudflare if you want meaningful product impact building critical internet infrastructure with a ship-fast culture — but expect comp to lag FAANG and uneven management quality.

2009

Founded

San Francisco

Headquarters

~4,000

Employees

NYSE: NET

Public Company

Culture Overview

What it's really like to work at Cloudflare

Founded in 2009 by Matthew Prince, Michelle Zatlyn, and Lee Holloway, Cloudflare has grown into one of the most important internet infrastructure companies in the world. The culture is engineering-driven with a strong bias toward shipping quickly and iterating. Teams are empowered to move fast, and the company prides itself on transparency — from its public blog posts about outages to its open approach to product development. Expect smart colleagues who care deeply about making the internet better, safer, and faster.

Eng-Driven Ship Fast Product Impact Learning Transparent

Glassdoor Ratings

Cloudflare Glassdoor Ratings & Employee Reviews

3.9

Overall Glassdoor Score

Based on employee reviews

Culture & Values 4.0

Compensation & Benefits 3.8

Senior Management 3.5

Career Opportunities 3.8

Work-Life Balance 3.7

Overall Rating 3.9

~72% Recommend to a Friend

~77% CEO Approval (Matthew Prince)

Employee Review Themes

Working at Cloudflare: Pros & Cons

✓ What employees love

✓ Mission-driven company building critical internet infrastructure — meaningful work with real impact
✓ Smart colleagues and a culture that values innovation, shipping quickly, and technical excellence

✗ What could be better

✗ Compensation can lag behind FAANG competitors, especially base salary
✗ Some teams experience high pressure and demanding workloads with uneven management quality

Engineering Culture

How the engineering team works

Tech Stack

Go Rust C/C++ TypeScript Lua

Open Source & Research

Major open source contributions including CFSSL, Pingora, and quiche. Active in internet standards (IETF) and publishes research on DNS, TLS, and network performance.

Engineering Blog

One of the best engineering blogs in tech — deep dives on outage post-mortems, protocol internals, and edge computing. Read the blog →

Team Structure

Product-oriented teams with end-to-end ownership. Engineers ship features across the global network. Strong culture of writing (design docs, RFCs) and transparency around incidents.

Open Positions

Join the Cloudflare team

... open positions.

Browse all jobs on the board →

Community Sentiment

What the community says about Cloudflare

Mostly Negative 2 mentions from Hacker News & Reddit · Updated 2026-03-26

“In my own humble opinion, jgc is the reason behind Cloudflare's open culture and incredible post-mortems. Thanks for making Cloudflare an incredible company to work for and with John. <3”

Hacker News sudsred · 2025-03-28 View thread →

“> Not sure how cloudflare keeps struggling with issues like theseCloudflare has a reasonable culture around incident response, but it doesn't incentivize proactive prevention.”

Hacker News kod · 2025-07-16 View thread →

Sentiment data refreshed daily from public Hacker News and Reddit discussions. See all company profiles →