Data Center Architect

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.

Location: Austin, San Francisco or New York

About the role

Cloudflare is hiring a Data Center Architect to define and deliver the physical infrastructure behind high-density compute and GPU deployments across our global network. You'll own 3 connected domains: the liquid cooling chain, the low-voltage connectivity layer, and the MV/LV electrical architecture that powers both.

This is a senior individual-contributor role spanning architecture, detailed design, technical qualification, design governance, commissioning, and operational readiness. You're Cloudflare's owner-side technical lead in these domains: the person who connects what our hardware needs with what colocation providers, equipment manufacturers, and delivery partners can actually build.

Scope runs from a single rack in commercial colocation to multi-megawatt compute deployments. You'll design power, cooling, and cabling as one system so they don't fight each other at the rack, in the white space, or during maintenance.

If your background is only HVAC design, only cold-plate research, or only utility-scale generation, this role will be wider than you expect. We need someone who can hold the electrical, cooling, and cabling layers together.

About the team

We work with engineering, capacity planning, network strategy, supply chain, and operations to grow Cloudflare's data center and PoP footprint. With colocation providers, hardware suppliers, and delivery partners worldwide, we turn infrastructure requirements into deployments that come online faster, cost less, and work the first time.

What you'll do

Architecture and reference designs

• Own the physical-infrastructure architecture. Build reference designs for power, liquid cooling, and connectivity for AI and high-density compute, including how they interface at rack, row, and site level. Maintain the standards, templates, and libraries that deployment, operations, and partner teams build from.

• Translate hardware and capacity needs into engineering requirements. Turn heat loads, electrical loads, port counts, network topologies, and growth plans into power, cooling, and connectivity requirements and into site and rack qualification criteria.

• Qualify sites and facility interfaces. Assess provider power and cooling availability, utility and backup capacity, water supply and return conditions, hydraulic capacity, upstream heat rejection, expansion headroom, maintenance constraints, and contractual boundaries. Give go/no-go recommendations with the risks written down.

Electrical power architecture (MV/LV)

• Lead MV and LV electrical architecture: single-line diagrams, power distribution, switchgear and UPS topology, busway and PDU design, grounding and bonding.

• Design physical power infrastructure, AC and DC, including power con