Cloudflare SME

Cloudflare SME

Remote

They are looking for a Cloudflare SME but the engagement is likely going to be for 4-6 weeks as they only need someone to help assess environment and do a little bit of work. They can sit remote but preference is EST or CST and interview will likely be 1 and done.

The ideal candidate will bring deep hands-on experience with Cloudflare’s platform, particularly in WAF management, bot mitigation, and edge performance optimization within complex or legacy environments.

Responsibilities

Cloudflare WAF & Security Optimization

• Assess and optimize Cloudflare WAF configuration, rules, and policies
• Implement and tune bot management controls, rate limiting, and access rules
• Ensure effective use of available Cloudflare capabilities, including advanced security features

Traffic Management & Bot Mitigation

• Analyze traffic patterns to identify bot activity and abnormal request behavior
• Develop strategies to throttle, block, or challenge suspicious traffic
• Protect high-impact application endpoints such as search, login, and session-driven pages

Edge Performance & CDN Optimization

• Optimize CDN behavior for static content delivery (e.g., JS, CSS, images)
• Improve request handling at the edge to minimize load on backend systems
• Identify opportunities to reduce origin traffic while maintaining application functionality

Infrastructure & Systems Collaboration

• Partner with infrastructure and application teams to align Cloudflare configurations with backend capabilities
• Recommend improvements to upstream traffic filtering and network-level controls
• Support hybrid environments, including third-party hosted systems and VPN-based connectivity

Troubleshooting & Root Cause Analysis

• Investigate performance issues related to traffic volume, system latency, and resource utilization
• Identify causes of backend strain, including database and search system bottlenecks
• Provide recommendations across edge, application, and infrastructure layers

Assessment & Advisory

• Conduct structured assessments of current Cloudflare usage and configuration
• Deliver recommendations and an optimization roadmap
• Provide guidance on best practices for traffic management, edge security, and performance

Required Qualifications

• Strong hands-on experience with Cloudflare, including:
  • Web Application Firewall (WAF) configuration
  • Bot management and rate limiting
  • CDN and edge caching strategies
• Experience supporting high-traffic web applications in production environments
• Solid understanding of HTTP/S traffic, session management, and caching constraints
• Background in one or more of the following:
  • Security engineering
  • Network engineering
  • Site reliability engineering (SRE)
  • DevOps or platform engineering

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with legacy web applications (e.g., / .NET environments)
• Familiarity with hybrid infrastructure models, including third-party hosting and on-prem connectivity
• Experience with Redis or application-level caching systems
• Exposure to search-heavy applications (e.g., Elasticsearch or similar platforms)
• Experience using Cloudflare APIs or infrastructure-as-code tools (e.g., Terraform)