Why Cloudflare’s one of the Top 100 Most Loved Workplaces in 2022

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At Cloudflare, we have strived to build a workplace where our entire team feels safe and excited to bring their whole selves to work, so they can do their best work. That’s why we are proud to share that Cloudflare has been named one of the Top 100 Most Loved Workplaces in 2022 by Newsweek and Best Practice Institute (BPI). Most Loved Workplaces recognizes companies where their workers love, and feel in sync with, the company they work for.

With this, and as we’re approaching the end-of 2022, we thought this was a good time to reflect on some of the things that go into being one of these Most Loved Workplaces and just some of what makes up our workplace and culture.

Something that really grounds our entire team is Cloudflare’s mission: to help build a better Internet. When you are solving some of the toughest challenges facing the Internet — helping make the Internet secure, fast, private, and reliable globally — you need a range of talented individuals to do this. The people at Cloudflare are exactly that, and are essential to our Continue reading

Building a sustainable workforce, through communities

At Cloudflare, we have our eyes set on an ambitious goal: to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world’s largest networks that powers approximately 25 million Internet properties. This is made possible by our 1,900 team members around the world. We believe the key to achieving our potential is to build diverse teams and create an environment where everyone can do their best work.

That is why we place a lot of value on the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion. Diversity, equity, and inclusion lead to better outcomes through improved decision-making, more innovative teams, stronger financial returns and simply a better place to work for everyone.

To become more diverse, equitable, and inclusive, we believe it’s important to focus on communities within and around our company.

Building internal communities at Cloudflare

At Cloudflare, like most workplaces, there are built-in communities: your direct team, your cross-functional partners and (because we take onboarding very seriously) your new hire class. These communities, especially the first two, are important to help you get your job done. But we want more than that for our team at Cloudflare. We believe that community builds connection and fosters a sense Continue reading

Cloudflare’s COVID-19 FAQs

As the status of COVID-19 continues to impact people and businesses around the world, Cloudflare is committed to providing awareness and transparency to our customers, employees, and partners about how we are responding. We do not anticipate any significant disruptions in Cloudflare services.

Our Business Continuity Team is monitoring the situation closely and all company personnel are kept up to date via multiple internal communication channels including a live chat room. Customers and the public are encouraged to visit this blog post for the latest information.

You can check the status of our network at www.cloudflarestatus.com. For COVID-19-related questions that aren’t answered below, please contact our Customer Support Team.

Does Cloudflare have a Business Continuity Team (BCT)?

Yes, Cloudflare’s Business Continuity Team is a cross-functional, geographically diverse group dedicated to navigating through a health crisis like COVID-19 as well as a variety of other scenarios that may impact employee safety and business continuity.

What is Cloudflare’s Business Continuity Plan in the light of COVID-19?

In addition to Cloudflare’s existing Disaster Recovery Plan we have implemented the following strategies:

• Daily Business Continuity Team meetings to determine if updates, changes, or communication need to be provided to customers, partners, and Continue reading

What I learned at my first Cloudflare Retreat

For the last seven years, Cloudflare has taken the entire company off site for a few days at the end of the year for a company retreat. Back in 2010, this meant five people from the San Francisco office. This November, we had 453 employees from our San Francisco, Singapore, London, Champaign (Illinois), New York City, Washington (DC), and Austin (Texas) offices spend time together in Monterey, California.

Knowing that so many teammates would be coming in from all over the world, we used the days leading up to the retreat to hold global team meetings, conduct a session of our home-grown Making Great Managers workshop, and brought in Valerie Aurora from Frame Shift Consulting to lead Ally Skills workshops for the entire company.

On Thursday, buses departed from Cloudflare headquarters and took us all down to Monterey. Our CEO, Matthew Prince, delivered opening remarks over lunch. During his talk, we learned about the imminent acquisition of Neumob, his thoughts about growing pains and how to successfully scale, and were reminded that we are at our best when we are inclusive of everyone. We reflected on how far we’ve come and got an inspiring glimpse of where we are Continue reading

A Celebration of Learning at Grace Hopper

Photo by Cloudflare Staff

Over the course of my career, I’ve been to many conferences, interacted with thousands of candidates, and attended countless keynotes, roundtables, and sessions. I can say without a doubt, that the Grace Hopper Celebration, stood out from the rest. And I think my team would agree.

During the three day event, we screened more than 50 candidates, conducted 24 onsite interviews, and had more than 600 people visit our booth. Not bad for a booth near the back competing with an AirBnB booth that had a literal house on top of it.

Before the conference, we were expecting about 200 visitors to our booth, so the turnout clearly exceeded our expectations. More importantly, we couldn’t have predicted the breadth of talent we would interact with at the conference. That’s not to say that I was surprised; Grace Hopper attracts women from all over the world, including students, seasoned professionals, hackers, engineers, and business leaders. This year was the biggest yet, with more than 12,000 attendees from across all tech sectors, backgrounds, and interests. So I certainly wasn’t surprised to meet all of these women, but I was definitely inspired.

Photo by Cloudflare Staff

My team Continue reading

Moving Forward with Path Forward

In February, I blogged about our first rotation of Path Forward returnships and the awesome people we’ve hired as a result of the program. As a refresher, Path Forward is a nonprofit organization that aims to empower people who’ve taken time away from their careers to focus on caregiving to return to the workforce.

Cloudflare started partnering with Path Forward this past year as a way to expand our talent pool to include the best and the brightest, regardless of any gaps in their career journeys. We truly believe in a diverse group of employees, and that includes those who can bring different perspectives from their time away from the workforce.

We’ve been lucky to have three amazing candidates go through the Path Forward program this time around across our People & Places, Solutions Engineering, and Marketing teams.

Christine Winston (director of partnerships, Path Forward), Me, and Tami Forman (executive director, Path Forward)

The Cloudflare Path Forward Experience

Gigi Chiu did a returnship with the Solutions Engineering team here at Cloudflare after taking some time off to raise her children. Before taking time off, she worked at Motorola and previously worked for a telco in Canada that was helping to Continue reading

Discovering Great Talent with Path Forward

In the fall of 2016, I was just beginning my job search. I’d been lucky to lead HR at a number of great cutting-edge technology start-ups, and I was looking for my next adventure. I wanted to find a company that wasn’t just a great business--I wanted one that was also making a positive impact on the world, and one that had a mission I felt passionately about.

During my two decades running HR/People organizations, I’ve spent a lot of time working with--and talking to--parents in the workplace. I’ve been motivated to do so for a few reasons. According to the US census, mothers are the fastest-growing segment of the US workforce. Companies struggle to retain talented workers after they’ve become parents, especially mothers. It’s been reported that 43 percent of highly qualified women with children leave their careers. Millennials (who make up the majority of the US workforce) are reporting that they want to be more engaged parents and are placing a high value on companies that allow them to parent and still get promoted. Ultimately, I’ve come to believe that the skills you acquire while parenting are extremely relevant and valuable to the workforce.

So when Path Continue reading