Security Research Analyst, WAF Managed Rules

Cloudflare
· United States, Austin, TX / New York, NY / San Francisco, CA

About Us

At Cloudflare, we are on a mission to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world’s largest networks that powers millions of websites and other Internet properties for customers ranging from individual bloggers to SMBs to Fortune 500 companies. Cloudflare protects and accelerates any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code.

Internet properties powered by Cloudflare all have web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with every request. As a result, they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. Cloudflare was named to Entrepreneur Magazine’s Top Company Cultures list and ranked among the World’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company.

At Cloudflare, we’re not looking for people who wait for a polished roadmap; we’re looking for the builders who see the cracks in the Internet that everyone else has simply learned to live with. We value candidates who have the instinct to spot a “normalized” problem and the AI-native curiosity to create a solution using the latest tools. Our culture is built on iteration, leveraging AI to ship faster today to make it better tomorrow, while ensuring that every improvement, no matter how small, is shared across the team to lift everyone up.

If you’re the type of person who values curiosity over bureaucracy, and that AI is a partner in solving tough problems to keep the Internet moving forward, you’ll fit right in.

Available Locations:Austin, TX;
San Francisco, CA;
New York City

About the Team

Our team researches web application attacks and turns that research into protections in Cloudflare’s Web Application Firewall (WAF). We build and maintain managed rules that help protect millions of Internet properties from known vulnerabilities, emerging exploits, and new attack techniques.

We work at the intersection of vulnerability research, large-scale traffic analysis, and detection engineering. Using threat intelligence and telemetry from Cloudflare’s global network, we identify exploitation patterns, develop mitigations, and measure how well they work against real traffic. We partner with Engineering, Product, and customer-facing teams to improve coverage while minimizing false positives and disruption to legitimate applications.

What You’ll Do

We are looking for a Security Research Analyst to research web application threats and develop the managed rules that protect Cloudflare customers. You will turn public CVEs, threat intelligence, customer reports, and internal telemetry into tested, effective mitigations.

Your work will span the detection lifecycle: understanding an exploit, designing a rule, validating it against malicious and legitimate requests, and measuring its behavior in production. You will collaborate with engineering and research partners to close coverage gaps and continuously improve the quality of our WAF protections.

Key responsibilities:

• Research vulnerabilities and exploitation.Analyze public CVEs, proof-of-concept exploits, and observed attacks to understand root causes, exploit chains, and opportunities for WAF mitigation.
• Develop and maintain managed rules.Design, test, and deploy WAF managed rules and exploit signatures, keeping protections effective as applications, exploits, and attacker techniques evolve.
• Investigate false positives and missed attacks.Analyze customer reports and request telemetry, reproduce issues, and refine detections to improve protection without unnecessarily blocking legitimate traffic.
• Validate coverage and…