Job Description
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.
At Cloudflare, we’re not looking for people who wait for a polished roadmap; we’re looking for the builders who see the cracks in the Internet that everyone else has simply learned to live with. We value candidates who have the instinct to spot a “normalized” problem and the AI-native curiosity to create a solution using the latest tools. Our culture is built on iteration, leveraging AI to ship faster today to make it better tomorrow, while ensuring that every improvement, no matter how small, is shared across the team to lift everyone up. If you’re the type of person who values curiosity over bureaucracy, and that AI is a partner in solving tough problems to keep the Internet moving forward, you’ll fit right in.
Available Locations: Austin, TX, New York, NY
Department: People & Culture
Reports to: VP, Talent
The Mission
This is an invitation to redefine workforce architecture for the AI era. Cloudflare is reimagining every internal process, from engineering to finance to sales, to run on an agentic AI backbone. We are building the global teams and talent ecosystems that will define what Cloudflare looks like for the next decade of the Internet. Getting top talent here is our number priority.
As our Vice President of Talent Acquisition, you will be the chief architect of our human capital infrastructure and lead a global team of customer obsessed recruiters and operators. You will design a predictive, highly automated talent system—one that maps company growth to workforce requirements, isolates where human judgment is irreplaceable, and deploys AI agents to handle the repetitive mechanics. We are looking for a visionary leader and highly operational leader whose instinct isn’t to simply deploy a traditional recruiting playbook, but to model the organizational system, identify the core constraints, and ship elegant, scalable solutions.
What you’re walking into
Cloudflare’s internal AI agent usage has increased exponentially, with our teams running thousands of daily agent sessions to build, ship, and scale products. This is our default operating rhythm.
Our talent acquisition strategy reflects this modern architecture. In the agentic AI era, you will lead the function that answers the ultimate organizational question: how do we optimize for the roles that require uniquely human capabilities?
You will focus our human hiring pipelines on where human capital matters most: deep creative judgment, complex systems problem-solving, and intense relationship depth. Every talent strategy you implement is a high-impact design choice for Cloudflare’s future organizational capacity.
What you’ll own
1. Customer Obsession & Outcome-Driven Systems
- Thinking Backward from the Customer: Treat our candidates and hiring managers as your ultimate customers. You will design the entire talent acquisition architecture by thinking backward from their experience—ensuring unmatched speed, absolute transparency, and mutual respect for everyone’s time.
- Outcomes Over Process: Ruthlessly eliminate “process for process’s sake.” You believe that workflows exist to enable great hiring, not to create bureaucratic hurdles. You will empower your team to be agile, adaptive, and focused on delivering high-quality matches rather than checking compliance boxes.
2. Talent System Architecture & Strategic Planning
- Enterprise Strategy: Partner with executive leadership to translate Cloudflare’s long-term product roadmaps and financial models into a predictive, multi-year global talent strategy.
- Pipeline Instrumentation: Build and monitor a highly data-driven talent funnel. Instrument key metrics—funnel health, passive-to-active conversion velocity, segment-specific time-to-fill, and quality-of-hire at the 6 and 12-month marks—to continuously tune the engine.
- AI-First Operations: Seamlessly deploy and scale AI agents across sourcing workflows, initial technical screening, scheduling logistics, and candidate communication loops to free up your team for deep relationship building.
3. High-Credibility Partnerships
- Peer-Level Alignment: Earn deep trust with our organizations through genuine technical fluency.
- Market Intelligence: Bring proactive talent market insights to organizational design conversations, advising leaders on global talent pool elasticity, compensation trends, and site selection before hiring needs even arise.
4. Global Operations & Team Leadership
- Inspirational Leadership: Lead, mentor, and elevate a global team of recruiters, technical sourcers, operational specialists, and passionate members of our team globally.
- Global Compliance Velocity: Maintain uncompromised data privacy and regulatory compliance (GDPR, pay transparency, local employment laws) across the US, EMEA, and APAC.
- Employer Brand as a Product
- Authentic Narrative: Position Cloudflare’s employer brand as an authentic reflection of our culture, attracting builders and sellers who are passionate about shaping an AI-first Internet.
- Future Talent Pipelines: Run early-career, university, and diversity recruiting initiatives with the same structured, metrics-driven approach applied to our senior staff engineering hires.
Highly Valued Signals
- Ideal Non-Traditional Backgrounds: We highly value senior people leaders from Management Consulting, Investment Banking, Engineering, Sales or corporate strategy environments, other functions within people leadership, where problem-solving begins with systems-level modeling, rigorous data diagnostics, and structural thinking.
- Infrastructure Tech Deep Roots: Prior leadership experience at a SaaS, cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, consumer, company where keeping a world-class technical bar is foundational to the company’s success.
- Organizational Agility: Experience successfully guiding talent operations through corporate reorganizations, high-growth scaling phases, or post-acquisition integrations with clear intent and structure.
- Compensation Architecture Fluency: Strong familiarity with market data platforms (Radford, Levels.fyi, Carta) and an understanding of equity design and localized compensation bands to help structure complex executive offers seamlessly.
- Global Scope: Direct experience scaling international tech hubs (specifically across EMEA and APJC), including a strong working knowledge of cross-border talent mobilization and regional employment practices.
Compensation
Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.
- For New York City based hires: Estimated annual salary of $375,000 - $400,000
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
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: Since 2014, we’ve equipped more than 2,400 journalism and civil society organizations in 111 countries 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: In 2017, we created the 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. Since the project, we’ve provided services to more than 425 local government election websites in 33 states.
1.1.1.1: We released1.1.1.1 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!
Please note that applicants who progress to the offer stage of the interview process may be asked to attend an in-person interview within one of the Cloudflare Offices or Cloudflare Hubs. More details about this will be available at that stage of the interview process.
This position may require access to information protected under U.S. export control laws, including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations. Please note that any offer of employment may be conditioned on your authorization to receive software or technology controlled under these U.S. export laws without sponsorship for an export license.
Cloudflare is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunity for all people and place great value in both diversity and inclusiveness. All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to their, or any other person’s, perceived or actualrace, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, family care status, or any other basis protected by law. We are an AA/Veterans/Disabled Employer.
Cloudflare provides reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities. Please tell us if you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job. Examples of reasonable accommodations include, but are not limited to, changing the application process, providing documents in an alternate format, using a sign language interpreter, or using specialized equipment. If you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job, please contact us via e-mail at [email protected] or via mail at 101 Townsend St. San Francisco, CA 94107.
