Research Engineer - Intern (US and Canada)

About the department

Cloudflare’s Research Team is involved with building the future of Cloudflare by tackling strategic projects that have a large impact on Cloudflare systems and the Internet at large. Our focus is on solving difficult problems in security, performance, and privacy at scale using cryptographic tools. We are launching new investigations in network architectures and protocols, distributed systems, and measurement. This involves systems engineering, open source software development, protocol design, implementation of primitives, with lots of performance evaluation alongside. We make cutting edge research contributions in-house, as well as in collaboration with academia, Internet standards organizations like the IETF, and more!

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

Research Internships and Responsibilities

Successful candidates will be matched to suitable software engineering projects related to applied cryptography, network architectures and protocols, or distributed systems. Research interns will work alongside experienced researchers and fellows to investigate new ideas and build novel technologies. Interns will have the opportunity to apply and develop their advanced skills to make meaningful contributions to Cloudflare. Cloudflare Research interns have opportunities to dive into and make changes to existing codebases, and collaborate closely with the Engineering organizations to achieve common goals.

Research Program Areas

Cloudflare research has four current program areas. We’re looking for interns with interest or expertise in one of these areas.

Network-layer privacy

This program is about reducing or eliminating metadata on the Internet that can be used to learn about user behavior online when viewed by an unauthorized party. This work helps upgrade Internet protocols so that metadata (hostnames -- via SNI, IP addresses, or fingerprintable data) can no longer be easily extracted from Internet packets. Example projects: Encrypted Client Hello (ECH), website fingerprinting protection, dynamic DNS and addressing agility, and connection coalescing.

Application-layer privacy

This program is about reducing or eliminating personal data at the application layer: applying innovative techniques based on splitting data between parties to make personal data superfluous or less identifiable so it isn’t needed in the delivery of powerful products and services both at Cloudflare and throughout the Internet ecosystem. Example projects: Cryptographic Attestation of Personhood, privacy-preserving analytics, Privacy Pass, and password-authenticated key exchange.

Internet and Network Measurement

This program is about measuring and mapping the components that are present on the Internet and how they interact with traffic. Cloudflare is among the most connected networks on the Internet. Work in this program measures the network to understand how it is evolving with an eye on helping improve availability, security, and performance. Example projects: BGP routing and security, IP address dynamics, denial-of-service, characterising security of online services.

Future-proofing the Internet

The Internet is evolving, both politically and technologically. This program is about building technologies and tools to anticipate the challenges that we anticipate when looking past the medium-term horizon. Example projects: deploying post-quantum cryptography through Cloudflare’s internal network, and building a geography-aware key management system.

General Intern Requirements

• An understanding of the way the Internet works at a protocol level, ideally with the ability to understand standards or specifications on paper and the way they work in practice.
• Evidence of open-source software contributions; alternatively contributions to standards development or peer-reviewed research
• Evidence of ability to work in multiple languages -- Go, Rust and Javascript 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)
• Strong systems level programming skills.
• Willing and eager to share knowledge, with the skills to do so.
• Have or able to obtain authorization to work in the country where the position will be located (currently USA, Canada, UK, EU, CH)

Additional Requirements

Knowledge or experience with at least one of the following:

• Applied cryptography and cryptographic protocols
• Computer networking protocols (TCP/IP, DNS, BGP, QUIC, etc.) and related algorithms
• Operating or distributed systems development
• Measurement for network and computer systems

 Bonus Points:

• Proven track record of independently driving projects in a fast-paced environment
• Contributions to open-source projects, peer-reviewed research, standards organizations, or equivalent public-domain community