Systems Engineer, MCP Portals

About Us

Available Locations: Lisbon, Portugal

Role Summary

Cloudflare MCP Server Portals give organizations a secure, centralized way to connect AI agents to internal and third-party tools. As a Systems Engineer on the MCP Portals team, you will build and operate the distributed systems that authenticate users, manage OAuth credentials and sessions, enforce Zero Trust policies, and proxy MCP traffic across Cloudflare's global network. You will own scoped projects from design through rollout and production support, working with engineers and product managers across Access, Gateway, and Developer Platform teams. We are looking for an engineer who can make sound technical decisions, work through ambiguous systems problems, and take responsibility for the services they build.

Role Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and operate distributed services that connect MCP clients to authorized upstream MCP servers.
• Own scoped features and service improvements through design, implementation, testing, rollout, observability, and production follow-up.
• Evolve our implementation as the MCP specification changes while maintaining compatibility for existing customers and integrations.
• Build secure authentication and authorization flows involving Cloudflare Access, OAuth, identity, and delegated access to upstream services.
• Improve the reliability, scalability, latency, and resource efficiency of multi-tenant systems built on the Cloudflare Developer Platform.
• Use structured logs, metrics, traces, dashboards, and alerts to understand service behavior; participate in production support and incident response.
• Investigate customer issues across multiple services, distinguishing product defects from upstream failures, policy configuration, and infrastructure dependencies.
• Collaborate with product, security, and engineering partners to turn customer needs and emerging standards into maintainable product capabilities.

Role Requirements

Must Have Skills

• 4+ years of experience building and operating distributed systems, backend services, network services, or infrastructure products in production.
• Strong programming skills in TypeScript, JavaScript, Go, Rust, C++, or another language used to build production services.
• Experience independently delivering changes to a production service, including testing, deployment, monitoring, and follow-up.
• A solid understanding of HTTP, APIs, proxies, streaming connections, and common distributed-systems failure modes.
• Experience debugging production systems using logs, metrics, traces, error reporting, and customer-provided evidence.
• Ability to reason carefully about security boundaries, credential handling, concurrency, state management, and backward-compatible deployments.
• Clear written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain technical tradeoffs and coordinate work across team boundaries.

Applicants should provide a resume or CV describing relevant engineering and operational experience.

Nice to Have Skills

• Experience with authentication and authorization technologies such as OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, JWTs, PKCE, or policy-based access control.
• Experience with the Model Context Protocol
• Familiarity with the Cloudflare Developer Platform or other serverless edge-computing platforms.
• Experience building gateways, forward proxies, identity systems, developer platforms, or Zero Trust and data loss prevention products.

Compensation

Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.

• For Bay Area based hires: Estimated annual salary of €45,000-62,000

What Makes Cloudflare Special?

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 actual race, 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.