Fall is my favorite season for numerous reasons: the change in temperature, pumpkin spice flavored...everything, and of course, the start of the university recruitment cycle. I am excited to announce Cloudflare has begun hiring for our Summer 2022 internship program. We just opened many of our internship roles on our careers website and will begin reviewing applications on a rolling basis. We are looking for Software Engineer, Product Management, Research, Data Science interns and more. Not only that, but we also have a host of virtual events and tech talks to engage prospective students throughout October and November. Find our event lineup below and RSVP through the attached links by clicking on the event titles.

*We have many more events coming up later in the fall and early spring 2022, join our community here for news and updates from us!

In September, Cloudflare kicked off our fall university recruitment efforts by participating in the virtual Grace Hopper Celebration 2021 (#vGHC21) with a team of hiring managers and recruiters from various teams such as Software Engineering, Security, Research, and Product Management. We have sponsored this conference for years, but this was our first experience participating virtually. We met and engaged with 1,000+ attendees through 1:1 conversations and tech talks in our virtual booth. Overall, we had an incredible experience with the virtual Grace Hopper Celebration this year and continue to be committed to hiring and providing opportunities for women at Cloudflare.

This upcoming summer, we expect to have the largest intern class ever at Cloudflare. We have more opportunities on more teams than in any previous summer. To learn more about our Engineering and Product internship opportunities, please check out this video from our hiring managers last fall. Many of our interns have written blog posts about their experiences working at Cloudflare. Check out Meyer Zinn’s blog post from this past summer. Our intern opportunities are not limited to technical roles, we have a host of internships for MBA and J.D. students, as well as those in non-technical majors such as our Communications Internship. We will be opening these opportunities later this fall and early spring 2022.

If you are interested in staying informed about our internships, virtual events and opportunities to engage with Cloudflare, feel free to sign up for email updates or join our community. We will be reviewing all applications on a rolling basis, so if you are waiting to hear back from us, please check out our blog or catch a segment on CloudflareTV to learn more about Cloudflare in the meantime.

And how we are planning to do it again in 2021…

On March 5, I sat in a small conference room with a few key contributors in creating and hiring for the Cloudflare summer intern program. With the possibility of office shutdowns looming, the group discussed what an internship would look like without in-person mentorship. How would the managers cope? How would the interns cope? Would it even be worthwhile? After a few minutes of discussions, we settled on ‘absolutely’. A remote summer internship at Cloudflare would be worthwhile for students, mentors, buddies, and managers alike. After all, Cloudflare is an Internet company and we were ready to trust the Internet with a whole lot more than we had anticipated.

The months leading up to the summer were a blur, all I remember is that we did a lot of planning, interviewing and hiring. And I mean, a lot. On April 2, Matthew Prince announced that Cloudflare would be doubling the size of our 2020 intern class in response to other companies cutting their intern programs all together. Due to these cuts, many talented students lost their opportunities for the summer. We knew we couldn’t hire them all so we created a list of peer organizations actively hiring and a three-month webinar program to give all applicants (whether they joined Cloudflare or not) mentorship from our executive team.

The program kicked off on May 18 with our first intern orientation group of the summer. Over the next month and a half, they were joined by six more orientation groups bringing the total intern class to 90 students. Being remote had its advantages, we were able to welcome students from all over the world and on nearly every team at Cloudflare — from Product Management to Engineering to Legal. We were proud to host a diverse class with nearly half of the students being from an underrepresented gender identity or racial ethnic minority.

A question I hear often is, “How do you replicate the benefits from an in-person experience to a remote one?”. The short answer is “You don’t”, but you adapt and stay positive and creative to help bring benefits that otherwise wouldn’t exist for the students. Throughout last summer, we held weekly Zoom lunches, created bi-weekly newsletters to share the various intern projects, and hosted hour-long executive “fireside chats” for the interns to directly meet our executive team. We had a buddy program and a mentor program; opportunities for each intern to be paired with a Cloudflare employee outside of their team as well as on their team respectively. We celebrated “Intern Week” at the end of July to facilitate students from different teams, regions, and continents in getting to know each other. To end the program, we hosted five “Intern Presentation Sessions” where each intern presented virtually about their projects and experiences to a company-wide audience.

To gauge the success of the program, we asked the students to anonymously submit how they felt about their teams, projects, and the intern events. In answering the question, “Did your internship experience meet your overall expectations?”, we received a 100% “Yes” response and 98% of the interns would consider working for Cloudflare again. See below for specific comments.

Many of our interns also detailed their virtual experiences on The Cloudflare Blog including Selina Cho, who reflected on personal and professional growth during her Product Management internship. Kevin Frazier, a Legal intern highlighted the sense of community and inclusiveness as “a common thread woven throughout the internship experience.” Ryan Jacobs outlined his journey in discovering the process, problem and solution of how Cloudflare uses Cloudflare Spectrum during his internship on the Spectrum team. We are always grateful and eager to read what our interns have to say about their time at Cloudflare.

As we look ahead, we are planning for an even bigger intern class filled with more engaging programs, nurturing events, and challenging projects. This year we are thrilled to nearly double (again) our intern class size and hire talented students for the exciting summer ahead. If you are interested in applying to one of our summer internship opportunities, check out our Careers page under the “University” section or reach out directly to us at students@cloudflare.com. Special thanks to Judy Cheong, our Head of University Programs, the Executive team, the Recruiting team, and all intern hiring managers and mentors for not only making the remote internship program possible, but a success!

If you truly want to be impressed by Cloudflare, interview with them. Every employee knows the process is deliberate, thoughtful, and diverse in taking the time to get to know a candidate while the candidate gets to know Cloudflare. It is humbling to realize that any employee interviewing has also passed through this challenging process. It all starts with a phone call, as most interviews do, and the process is fairly standard until you reach the onsite, when things begin to deviate from the norm.

I arrived for my onsite interview and was greeted by the front desk team with such enthusiasm as they smiled, laughed amongst each other, and jammed to Hall & Oates. Right away, I felt relieved, comfortable, and even more so, excited. I interviewed with seven employees that day, as I answered different questions about myself, asked them anything from “How would you describe Cloudflare to your grandmother?” to “What is a DDoS attack?”, and left knowing a great deal about the Internet and the company. The interview felt more like an open classroom with encouraging professors and less like a small, sterile examination room. I left the office energetic, a rare feeling after the usual grueling onsite [to which] I had become accustomed. Weeks later after starting my new job at Cloudflare, I realized that the onsite interview perfectly mimics the learning environment and leadership style of Cloudflare co-founders, Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn.

After hearing that I had been moved on to the next stage, I was able to speak with the Head of People, Janet Van Huysse. The thing I remember most from my conversation with Janet is talking about weaknesses. Janet asked me the daunting question, “What’s your biggest weakness?” adding, “but a true weakness, not just something that can be spun into a strength”. I answered truthfully and we moved on. This struck me as very real, a genuine conversation between two people getting to know each other rather than feeling like I was under a microscope. In the past, most interviews involving that question were dragged on as the interviewee is split between being honest and wanting to sound competent and this was not that case. Despite her chaotic schedule, Janet was intentional about trying to get to know me. I still look back at that conversation as the turning point in knowing I was “all-in” for Cloudflare.

Me (front and center) and some of my colleagues on the Recruiting Team

The last step in the interview process was a final call. Cloudflare gives candidates the unique opportunity to interview a member of their executive team as a last stage. This stage is essentially a confirmation on both ends that working at Cloudflare is the best fit for the candidate and for the company. I was told that my final call was with Matthew Prince, the CEO and Co-Founder of Cloudflare. I had only once spoken to a CEO of a 90+ sized company and thought that was a huge deal. Now I was going to speak with a CEO of a company nearly nine times as large. So yes, you could say I was nervous.

Looking back, I should not have been nervous at all. My phone call with Matthew felt like a conversation with one of my former college professors, empathetic and enlightening. The first thing he did was apologize for calling me three minutes late. During our conversation, I learned about the origins of Cloudflare, Matthew’s background, and his hopes for the future of the company. He gave me the opportunity to ask him any questions I may have and by the end of our conversation, I felt highly confident that I was a good fit for Cloudflare and vice versa.

Throughout this blog post I have referenced aspects of school life to describe my interview experience. Cloudflare is changing the game when it comes to hiring because they are converting the stale, uncomfortable process into a learning process facilitated by approachable, nonjudgmental teachers. This process is representative of the overall culture - keep asking questions, keep being curious, keep learning new things and above all, be empathetic to those that do so in return. To further prove so, the entire first week of working for Cloudflare is spent in a classroom at orientation. My new peers and I spent five days learning about internet safety, the inner workings of Cloudflare, diversity and inclusion initiatives, and how we all fit together. I previously stated, if you want to truly be impressed by Cloudflare, interview with them – but I’d like to take that a step further: if you want to learn and grow as a person, interview with Cloudflare.