I applied online. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Cloudflare in Mar 2023
Interview
Submitted an application thru their careers portal. Received an email 3 weeks later from an engineering manager. He asked simple questions about my background. He told me the process was quick: initial interview, then a take home coding exercise, then a technical interview with the team manager and finally the offer. Then I was sent a take home coding exercise which I submitted in less than 24 hours. It was to do a TLS handshake with their server and decrypt a link to a Google docs form. Then it took them a week to get back to me. I arranged the interview with the team manager. Interview lasted 30 minutes and he only set aside 10 minutes for the single technical question which was a system design question to design the parts of a Message Authentication Code system. Like what? MAC is a concept/primitive in cryptography not a product that has its own system. Anyways, he was a total snob and with his accent I couldn't understand half of what he was saying. He literally told me that they have someone in Singapore and have a problem sorting out logistics for his relocation so I would be the backup hire depending on how his relocation goes. Hearing this, I immediately lost interest in the position and the company. Further he said they don't follow Agile but Waterfall on 3 month cycles. I received a response 3 days later that they went with another candidate. I am assuming with the other dude from Singapore.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Perform a TLS handshake with a Cloudflare worker service and decrypt the response which contained a link to a Google form. Also do a system design for a Message Authentication Code system in 10 minutes without a whiteboard and over the phone.
I applied through other source. I interviewed at Cloudflare (Austin, TX)
Interview
screening was not leetcode style problem, in loop round they asked me to implement problem which i was able to do it within time, system design round was conversational. amazing company to interview with. learned lot of things about them along the way
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
data structure algorithms problem, and standard behavioral questions.
I applied online. I interviewed at Cloudflare (Austin, TX) in Mar 2026
Interview
Started with a 30-minute conversation with the hiring manager. He was amazing, very friendly, and the questions were mostly resume-based. The next round was a 1-hr TPS interview with an engineering manager. It was a HackerRank-style question (not typical LeetCode), but practicing LeetCode definitely helped in choosing the right data structures. After that, I had a conversation with the recruiter to discuss salary, location, next steps, etc. The interview loop consisted of 5 rounds: 30 mins: Culture fit (behavioral questions), 45 mins: PM interview (behavioral, focused on collaboration with PMs), 45 mins: Debugging round (debugging a working system - fairly easy), 1 hour: System design (medium to hard), 45 mins: AI-assisted coding round
Overall, all the interviewers were great to interact with and very supportive throughout the process. The AI-assisted round was similar to debugging, but they expected me to “vibe-code” using AI to identify issues and fix bugs or add features. After clearing these rounds, the final steps included an office visit and a 15-minute call with a CXO.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Tell me about a project you worked on recently and what were the challenges? Tell me about a time you made a mistake or failed. Why Cloudflare and why this team? How do you approach building a feature when you don't fully understand user needs?
I applied online. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Cloudflare (Austin, TX) in Mar 2026
Interview
So the interview process involved 7 interviews and it would’ve been 8 (excluding office tour and recruiter calls) if they went through with the last round but the recruiter had a slick way of saying it’s 4 rounds with the 3rd being a loop of 5 interviews. The first interview is with a hiring manager call which went well. Then there was a live coding round where they asked me to build a battleship game which was pretty average in terms of difficulty. Then we went into the loop round with an orange cloud interview(behavioural), debugging, system design, product manager and another hiring manager interview where there was an AI coding challenge where you use prompts to fix bugs in a project or an environment that you’re not familiar with (which they didn’t mention earlier). After the loop round they tell me that the team feedback was positive so they will select me for a final call which will be with one of the two cofounders or senior executives. Before setting that call up they invited me for an Austin office tour which went great too. Then I get a call from the recruiter saying that the company is evolving so they are doing an exercise to re-evaluate the roles to see which to keep and which to cancel and this exercise would take a minimum of 2 weeks. After 3 weeks, the recruiter comes back and says “after reevaluating the role, the team went in a different direction for the role”. A TOTAL waste of time. The interviewers were actually nice and friendly and the recruiter was pretty responsive too but it looks to me like it’s a leadership decision but why waste people’s time and do the interviews before doing the exercises or reevaluations.