A two-track community program

Cloudflare is restructuring how it supports the people who educate others, organize events, and maintain open-source software around its platform. The revamped program splits into two roles: Cloudflare Ambassadors, who bring Cloudflare into their local or online communities, and Cloudflare Community Engineers, who receive grants for sustained open-source work. A new hub at cloudflare.com/community explains both tracks and hosts the ambassador application.

The reasoning is straightforward: a healthy ecosystem depends on volunteers who answer questions in Discord, run meetups, or maintain libraries that others build on. Cloudflare wants to give those people concrete support rather than relying on goodwill alone.

Cloudflare Ambassadors

Ambassadors are expected to organize events — meetups, hackathons, workshops, or talks — on campus, through local organizations, or across their city. They may also lead student groups, publish tutorials, or act as the go-to person for peers curious about what Cloudflare can do. For events, Cloudflare provides credits, marketing assets, and technical resources. Ambassadors also get a visible role in Cloudflare’s online spaces, including Discord, so other developers know who to turn to for help.

Ambassador terms run up to two years, which Cloudflare says gives people time to build momentum while letting the company rotate support across more communities. Applications are open now and close September 6; selected candidates will be notified by October 5.

Cloudflare cites Sruthi Pereddy, a computer science major at University of Michigan and an intern on Cloudflare’s Recruiting Ops team, as an example of the energy it hopes to attract. “Students are ready to build, but often feel constrained by resources,” she says. “I’m excited to bridge that gap and make sure they have the infrastructure to turn their ideas into reality from day one.”

Community Engineers and open-source funding

Much of Cloudflare’s developer platform is open source or built on open-source work, including workerd and quiche. To support the maintainers doing that labor, Cloudflare is introducing Community Engineers: developers working on projects in the orbit of Cloudflare’s own open-source efforts, such as Astro, Agents SDK, EmDash, Hono, and Vinext. Those selected receive grants and a special designation in Cloudflare’s Discord and other online spaces.

Cloudflare is committing an additional $1M to sponsor open-source projects over the next two years, on top of the $1M fund announced with the VoidZero acquisition for the Vite community. Unlike the Ambassador role, the Community Engineer program has no maximum term; open-source maintenance doesn’t fit annual cycles, and Cloudflare says some projects need years of care while others need work at a specific moment. Application dates for these grants will be announced later.

The company points to its existing sponsorship of TanStack as evidence of the model’s impact. TanStack creator Tanner Linsley says the support has let him invest in foundational work that’s hard to tie to a single product launch. “More than anything, that support buys stability, which is kind of everything when you’re building open source for the long haul,” he says.

Discord grows up

Cloudflare’s Discord server has drawn nearly 100,000 users since launching in 2020, making it one of the primary places developers ask questions and share feedback. To keep the server healthy at that scale, Cloudflare is forming a Discord committee where Ambassadors join staff. The focus is not moderation — Cloudflare says automated protections against spam and malicious links handle much of that, and those tools will be open-sourced soon — but content and connection. Committee members will steer conversations to domain experts and convene sessions with internal teams and community builders.

Ambassador applications for the 2026-27 cohort are open through the community site. The Discord server remains the main gathering point for day-to-day conversation.