Cloudflare Lisbon: One Year Later

Cloudflare has published a status update on its Lisbon office, detailing growth through a challenging 2020 and its ambitions into 2021. The report arrives several months after the engineering team bootstrapped its Portuguese operations alongside a global pandemic that forced a fully remote working environment. Despite that disruption, hiring has accelerated, and the site is positioned as a key global hub.

Building a team remotely

Onboarding during COVID-19 presented friction. New employees learned processes, met colleagues, and got productive without physical proximity. But the organization leans on structured orientation, documented practices, and a deliberate culture of check-ins. Those scaffolding elements allowed a large distributed workforce, numbering over 1,600 in the reporting period and spread across continents, to feel cohesive rather than segmented.

Close to 10% of local staff are Portuguese emigrants who have returned home. The team also prioritizes diversity in hiring, primarily gender representation.

Small talk about Portuguese music, holiday customs, or whether pastéis de nata benefit from cinnamon adds texture, but trivia nights and escape rooms remain largely virtual.

Growth on the ground

The Lisbon office boasted 74 employees across Engineering, Security, Infrastructure, Customer Support, People, Product Management, Accounting, and other departments as of the report. The final two months of the year alone added 15 people. Seventeen recruits came from abroad.

Recruitment continues with 28 open roles at publication time. Two teams are notably expanding locally: Data Insights and Cloudflare Radar are both slated to double in size in 2021. Several other openings support globally distributed feature teams.

Plans call for elevating Lisbon to sit alongside San Francisco, Austin, Singapore, and London as a preferred location for investment and senior talent.

Available support for returnees

The Portuguese government's Programa Regressar offers tax breaks and financial assistance for returning residents. Observers regard the program as insufficient on its own. A competitive salary is not the deciding factor for candidates.

The company positions job applicants as being able to receive the best of both worlds: Portuguese living conditions alongside solutions at scale.

Visas and relocation support are handled by the recruiting team.

Interviews, probing the stack

Potential candidates can research using publicly funded material. The organization points to weekly engineering recruitment opportunities. Engineering managers take part in open Q&As on a dedicated segment. The blog remains a primary window into technical decisions and organizational priorities.

More hands-on channels for preparation include:

  • cloudflare-go and flarectl for working with the product API.
  • Community forums for operational questions from practitioners, alongside public Twitter accounts.
  • A robust open-source footprint consisting of over 300 public GitHub repositories.
  • Cloudflare TV broadcasts talks, schedules, and a best-of archive.

Reputation at scale

Cloudflare's Global network contends with roughly 20 million HTTP requests per second and counts about 16% of the Fortune 500 among its customers. The free tier is substantial; Developers plan allowances reach 100,000 Workers requests per day with Workers KV included. Those considering joining can prototype using any of these live services.