Location- New York, NY 

About the Department

Cloudflare’s Engineering Team is home to some of the industry’s top engineers, dedicated to building and scaling innovative software that handles a huge proportion of the Internet. Our Detection department sits at the heart of that mission: we identify automated, fraudulent, and malicious activity across the Internet and through our gateway. We develop advanced detection systems and machine learning models that operate at scale, collaborating with Product and Engineering teams across the company to protect our customers and stay ahead of the constantly evolving threat landscape.

What You’ll Do

• Study our adversaries deeply – reverse-engineer bot tools, automation frameworks, and fraud kits to understand how they work and how they evolve.
• Play the cat-and-mouse game: probe our own detections like an attacker would, close the gaps, and stay a step ahead as adversaries adapt.
• Track the bot and fraud ecosystem through tooling, marketplaces, and emerging techniques. Turn that intelligence into actionable detection signals.
• Develop heuristics, signatures, and detection ideas grounded in real adversary behavior, partnering with Data Scientists and Engineers to bring them to life.
• Design mitigations that neutralize attackers without tipping our hand; preserving our detection signals rather than teaching adversaries how to evade them.
• Automate the work analysts do by hand by turning manual investigation and rule-writing into scalable, automated detection.

Must Haves

You know our adversaries. You understand bots, automation, and the tooling used to attack web applications at scale.

• Deep web expertise. You know HTTP, TLS, browser internals, fingerprinting, CAPTCHAs, and the techniques used to evade them.
• You love the hunt. You enjoy ethical hacking and reverse engineering, with an adversarial mindset that assumes every defense can be broken — and the creativity to prove it.

Who You Are

• From research to detection. You translate what you learn about attackers into concrete signals defenders can use.
• Mitigation without burning signals. You understand (or are curious to learn) how to act on attackers without burning the signals that make them detectable.
• Disciplined in code. You script comfortably (e.g., Python, JavaScript) to build proofs-of-concept and tooling – and you write it cleanly, whether it's throwaway or meant to last.
• Clear communicator. You explain complex attacker behavior to technical and non-technical audiences alike.

Compensation

• Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.
• For New York based hires: Estimated annual salary of $150,000 - $185,000.

Equity

• This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare's equity plan.

Benefits

• Cloudflare offers a complete package of benefits and programs to support you and your family. Our benefits programs can help you pay health care expenses, support caregiving, build capital for the future and make life a little easier and fun! The below is a description of our benefits for employees in the United States, and benefits may vary for employees based outside the U.S.
• Health & Welfare Benefits
• Medical/Rx Insurance
• Dental Insurance
• Vision Insurance
• Flexible Spending Accounts
• Commuter Spending Accounts
• Fertility & Family Forming Benefits
• On-demand mental health support and Employee Assistance Program
• Global Travel Medical Insurance
• Financial Benefits
• Short and Long Term Disability Insurance
• Life & Accident Insurance
• 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan
• Employee Stock Participation Plan
• Time Off
• Flexible paid time off covering vacation and sick leave
• Leave programs, including parental, pregnancy health, medical, and bereavement leave