Research Intern

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.

We realize people do not fit into neat boxes. We are looking for curious and empathetic individuals who are committed to developing themselves and learning new skills, and we are ready to help you do that. We cannot complete our mission without building a diverse and inclusive team. We hire the best people based on an evaluation of their potential and support them throughout their time at Cloudflare. Come join us!

Available location: Lisbon, Portugal

About the department

Cloudflare’s Research Team pursues strategic projects that have a large impact on Cloudflare systems and the Internet at large. Our focus is on solving difficult problems to connect and protect users, applications, and data, while helping to make the Internet to be resilient and transparent.

In our quest to help make a better Internet, we frequently find ourselves exploring open problems at the boundaries of knowledge in scalable security, privacy, and systems, using techniques including AI/ML and performance analysis. We make cutting edge research contributions in-house, as well as in collaboration with academia, Internet standards organizations like the IETF, and more!

Our team includes experts in applied cryptography, privacy, network architectures and protocols, measurement, cache optimization, machine learning for systems, and time series analysis. We seek interns that augment our existing expertise as well as those who are working in broadly related areas. We have a vast set of potential projects focussed on our current priorities. We also welcome new ideas via concrete proposals that, more than just satisfying curiosity, may help to improve Cloudflare or aspects of the Internet and surrounding technologies touched by Cloudflare. We are, after all, researchers at heart and love learning, too!

More information about Cloudflare's approach to research can be found here.

About the Internship Program

The ideal summer intern is passionate about making the Internet a better place. You will work with a strong team of talented professionals. Your work this summer will impact hundreds of millions of web surfers. We like to get things done, so we are looking for interns who are curious and can take on and complete projects. This is a great opportunity for those who want to learn the ins and outs of Research.

What would you do as a Cloudflare intern?

• Ship and deliver projects over 12-16 weeks with autonomy and support.
• Work cross-functionally with various teams.
• Be assigned a mentor to guide you through the internship and help with career goals.
• Build your network across the company through our various in and out of office socials, networking programs, Employee Resource Group (ERG) programs, and Activity Groups (Cat or dog lovers, we’ve got communities for you! @Catflare @Doggos).
• Present your project to the entire company at the end of the internship.
• Get direct access to our executives and leadership team including our co-founders.
• Learn and develop skills through our professional development workshops.
• Write for our Cloudflare blog and be featured on Cloudflare.tv sessions.
• Receive Cloudflare swag and free Cloudflare products!

You can check out our internship blogs to learn more about our program and hear directly from our past interns.

What you'll do

Cloudflare's Research Team solves difficult problems in security, privacy, and systems at scale. This involves engineering, data analysis, open source software development, protocol design, implementation of primitives, with lots of measurement alongside.

Successful candidates will be matched to suitable projects in on-going research directions. Current research streams delve into:

• advancing application privacy
• transitioning to a post-quantum Internet
• improving network connection performance
• understanding vulnerabilities of the Internet infrastructure
• using AI/ML models for performance optimization,
• maximizing systems efficiency.

General Research Intern Requirements

• Evidence of tackling hard or open-ended problems.
• Proven track record of peer-reviewed research, open-source software contributions, or standards development, that is commensurate with level of training --- students at all levels are welcome to apply.
• Evidence of ability to work in multiple languages -- Go, Rust, Javascript, C/C++, or Python are particularly desirable.
• Experience (and love) for debugging to ensure the system works in all cases.
• Experience with a continuous integration workflow, and use of source control (we use git)
• Willing and eager to share knowledge, with the skills to do so.

Additional Requirements

Knowledge or experience with at least one of the following:

• Computer networking protocols (TCP/IP, DNS, BGP, QUIC, etc.) and related algorithms
• Machine learning analysis, ideally in systems or network optimization
• Authentication protocols, applied cryptography, PKI and SSL/TLS
• Operating or distributed systems analysis or development
• Measurement for network and computer systems

Bonus Points:

• Proven track record of independently driving projects in a fast-paced environment
• Experience working in groups, or with multiple stakeholders.
• Strong systems level programming skills.

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: We equip politically and artistically important organizations and journalists with powerful tools to defend themselves against attacks that would otherwise censor their work, technology already used by Cloudflare’s enterprise customers--at no cost.

Athenian Project: We created Athenian Project to ensure that state and local governments have the highest level of protection and reliability for free, so that their constituents have access to election information and voter registration.

1.1.1.1: We released 1.1.1.1 to help fix the foundation of the Internet by building a faster, more secure and privacy-centric public DNS resolver. This is available publicly for everyone to use - it is the first consumer-focused service Cloudflare has ever released. Here’s the deal - we don’t store client IP addresses never, ever. We will continue to abide by our privacy commitment and ensure that no user data is sold to advertisers or used to target consumers.

Sound like something you’d like to be a part of? We’d love to hear from you!