Cloudflare Systems Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

This was the most unprofessional interview experience I've ever had. I got ghosted during the team match phase after passing all the technical interviews: hiring manager screen, coding screen, coding exercise, system design interview, project retrospective interview, and the orange cloud interview. The whole process took over 5 months, and I eventually gave up trying to get a response after they said they'd schedule team match conversations. It was a total waste of more than 10 hours. Cloudflare had long periods of silence, multiple weeks long, during the process. Twice, interviewers didn't show up, and I had to keep asking about the status to get the interviews rescheduled. The unprofessional communication was a huge red flag, making me doubt the health of the organization. Very disappointing.

Had about 11 conversations, starting with the hiring manager then a recruiter then a list of technical interviews, a non-technical interview and then 2 higher management interviews. Every conversation was very chill and I never felt pressured or like they were not interested. I could ask a lot of questions and learned a lot. People seemed very empathetic and down to earth. The technical interviews started off decently simple, but then went into depth, starting with a seemingly trivial question and then deepdiving into nuances.

I reached out to Cloudflare in August about a summer 2016 internship. The interviews were generally quite nice and professional. They responded and scheduled an initial phone screening quickly. After that, they set up a phone interview with an engineer. They then told me to reconnect around November because August was too early to sort out intern positions. When November arrived, I emailed the recruiter I had been working with, but got no replies. Fortunately, I managed to contact Michelle Zatlyn and discovered the recruiter had moved to a different role. I spoke with a new recruiter who mentioned he'd send my resume to all the teams and follow up in a week to arrange an on-site interview. Two weeks passed without any contact, so I emailed him. Another two weeks went by with no response. I sent another email. Still nothing. It's been a month and a half with no response, so I accepted an offer from another company due to time constraints. The whole experience felt disorganized and negative. Hopefully, it will improve in the future.