Principal Engineer Jobs in Austin, TX
Principal Engineer jobs in Austin are in strong demand, concentrated in the Domain, downtown's Second Street District, and the East Austin tech corridor, with openings across semiconductor design, enterprise software, and clean energy. Employers hiring right now include CesiumAstro, Cadence, and NVIDIA. Find a role that fits below and apply directly.
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Showing 5 of 247+ Principal Engineer jobs
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.
About the team and the role
The Developer Tooling team builds internal tools and platforms that improve the velocity and developer experience of Cloudflare's engineering teams. We own developer productivity (code commit to production), developer insights and ADLC metrics, developer infrastructure (CI/CD, build systems), AI-assisted development, and Cloudflare-on-Cloudflare dogfooding.
This team is responsible for AI-assisted development across all of Cloudflare engineering. Adoption has grown 4–6x in the last year. It's a small team, so you'll have a big surface area and real ownership from day one.
As a Principal Engineer, you'll build and operate the AI tools thousands of engineers use every day. It's a hands-on role with both engineering and operational responsibility. You'll be embedded with the DevTools Engineering Manager and help shoulder technical mentorship and end-to-end ownership of projects, while caring deeply about the experience of the engineers you build for.
What you'll do
Ship features for our AI coding tools
Build and improve AI and other developer-observability tools.
Own our internal MCP servers (GitLab, Confluence, Jira, Backstage etc.).
Build AI agents.
Maintain our context engineering: shared configs, prompt libraries, and agent instructions.
Wire AI tooling into CI/CD pipelines.
Handle security and access controls for AI tools.
Track adoption and usage across the org.
Triage and respond to support in our tool channels.
Own projects end to end - from roadmap and prioritization through delivery and operation.
Mentor teammates and raise the bar through code review and design feedback.
Help respond to and prevent incidents on the tools engineers depend on.
Desirable skills, knowledge and experience
Strong coding ability in TypeScript, Go, Rust and Bash.
Excellent debugging skills.
Source control experience including branching, merging, and rebasing.
Experience deploying and operating on Kubernetes or a similar platform.
Comfort breaking down complex problems, weighing trade-offs, and driving them to done.
A habit of mentoring and raising the bar for the people around you.
Experience with, or strong interest in, building tools that improve DevEx
Bonus points
Experience building LLM-based tools in production (agents, evals, cost and latency tuning).
Experience with CI/CD systems and build tooling.
Experience building on Cloudflare's platform (Workers, AI Gateway) - or eagerness to.
Operating Kubernetes on-premise at scale (SRE, systems design, or architecture).
Building platforms across multiple zones and regions.
Prior work on a platform engineering or developer-productivity team.
Open-source contributions to developer tooling or AI projects.
Compensation
Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.
- For New York City, Washington, Washington D.C. and California (excluding Bay Area) based hires: Estimated annual salary of $230,000 - $281,000
- For Colorado based hires: Estimated annual salary of $200,000 - $275,000
Equity
This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare's equity plan.
Benefits
Cloudflare offers a complete package of benefits and programs to support you and your family. Our benefits programs can help you pay health care expenses, support caregiving, build capital for the future and make life a little easier and fun! The below is a description of our benefits for employees in the United States, and benefits may vary for employees based outside the U.S.
Health & Welfare Benefits
- Medical/Rx Insurance
- Dental Insurance
- Vision Insurance
- Flexible Spending Accounts
- Commuter Spending Accounts
- Fertility & Family Forming Benefits
- On-demand mental health support and Employee Assistance Program
- Global Travel Medical Insurance
Financial Benefits
- Short and Long Term Disability Insurance
- Life & Accident Insurance
- 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan
- Employee Stock Participation Plan
Time Off
- Flexible paid time off covering vacation and sick leave
- Leave programs, including parental, pregnancy health, medical, and bereavement leave
What Makes Cloudflare Special?
We're not just a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company. We're a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company with a soul. Fundamental to our mission to help build a better Internet is protecting the free and open Internet.
Project Galileo: Since 2014, we've equipped more than 2,400 journalism and civil society organizations in 111 countries with powerful tools to defend themselves against attacks that would otherwise censor their work, technology already used by Cloudflare's enterprise customers-at no cost.
Athenian Project: In 2017, we created the Athenian Project to ensure that state and local governments have the highest level of protection and reliability for free, so that their constituents have access to election information and voter registration. Since the project, we've provided services to more than 425 local government election websites in 33 states.
1.1.1.1: We released 1.1.1.1 to help fix the foundation of the Internet by building a faster, more secure and privacy-centric public DNS resolver. This is available publicly for everyone to use - it is the first consumer-focused service Cloudflare has ever released. Here's the deal - we don't store client IP addresses never, ever. We will continue to abide by our privacy commitment and ensure that no user data is sold to advertisers or used to target consumers.
Sound like something you'd like to be a part of? We'd love to hear from you!
Please note that applicants who progress to the offer stage of the interview process may be asked to attend an in-person interview within one of the Cloudflare Offices or Cloudflare Hubs. More details about this will be available at that stage of the interview process.
This position may require access to information protected under U.S. export control laws, including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations. Please note that any offer of employment may be conditioned on your authorization to receive software or technology controlled under these U.S. export laws without sponsorship for an export license.
Cloudflare is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunity for all people and place great value in both diversity and inclusiveness. All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to their, or any other person's, perceived or actual race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, family care status, or any other basis protected by law. We are an AA/Veterans/Disabled Employer.
Cloudflare provides reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities. Please tell us if you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job. Examples of reasonable accommodations include, but are not limited to, changing the application process, providing documents in an alternate format, using a sign language interpreter, or using specialized equipment. If you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job, please contact us via e-mail at hr@cloudflare.com or via mail at 101 Townsend St. San Francisco, CA 94107.
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.
About the team and the role
The Developer Tooling team builds internal tools and platforms that improve the velocity and developer experience of Cloudflare's engineering teams. We own developer productivity (code commit to production), developer insights and ADLC metrics, developer infrastructure (CI/CD, build systems), AI-assisted development, and Cloudflare-on-Cloudflare dogfooding.
This team is responsible for AI-assisted development across all of Cloudflare engineering. Adoption has grown 4–6x in the last year. It's a small team, so you'll have a big surface area and real ownership from day one.
As a Principal Engineer, you'll build and operate the AI tools thousands of engineers use every day. It's a hands-on role with both engineering and operational responsibility. You'll be embedded with the DevTools Engineering Manager and help shoulder technical mentorship and end-to-end ownership of projects, while caring deeply about the experience of the engineers you build for.
What you'll do
Ship features for our AI coding tools
Build and improve AI and other developer-observability tools.
Own our internal MCP servers (GitLab, Confluence, Jira, Backstage etc.).
Build AI agents.
Maintain our context engineering: shared configs, prompt libraries, and agent instructions.
Wire AI tooling into CI/CD pipelines.
Handle security and access controls for AI tools.
Track adoption and usage across the org.
Triage and respond to support in our tool channels.
Own projects end to end - from roadmap and prioritization through delivery and operation.
Mentor teammates and raise the bar through code review and design feedback.
Help respond to and prevent incidents on the tools engineers depend on.
Desirable skills, knowledge and experience
Strong coding ability in TypeScript, Go, Rust and Bash.
Excellent debugging skills.
Source control experience including branching, merging, and rebasing.
Experience deploying and operating on Kubernetes or a similar platform.
Comfort breaking down complex problems, weighing trade-offs, and driving them to done.
A habit of mentoring and raising the bar for the people around you.
Experience with, or strong interest in, building tools that improve DevEx
Bonus points
Experience building LLM-based tools in production (agents, evals, cost and latency tuning).
Experience with CI/CD systems and build tooling.
Experience building on Cloudflare's platform (Workers, AI Gateway) - or eagerness to.
Operating Kubernetes on-premise at scale (SRE, systems design, or architecture).
Building platforms across multiple zones and regions.
Prior work on a platform engineering or developer-productivity team.
Open-source contributions to developer tooling or AI projects.
Compensation
Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.
- For New York City, Washington, Washington D.C. and California (excluding Bay Area) based hires: Estimated annual salary of $230,000 - $281,000
- For Colorado based hires: Estimated annual salary of $200,000 - $275,000
Equity
This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare's equity plan.
Benefits
Cloudflare offers a complete package of benefits and programs to support you and your family. Our benefits programs can help you pay health care expenses, support caregiving, build capital for the future and make life a little easier and fun! The below is a description of our benefits for employees in the United States, and benefits may vary for employees based outside the U.S.
Health & Welfare Benefits
- Medical/Rx Insurance
- Dental Insurance
- Vision Insurance
- Flexible Spending Accounts
- Commuter Spending Accounts
- Fertility & Family Forming Benefits
- On-demand mental health support and Employee Assistance Program
- Global Travel Medical Insurance
Financial Benefits
- Short and Long Term Disability Insurance
- Life & Accident Insurance
- 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan
- Employee Stock Participation Plan
Time Off
- Flexible paid time off covering vacation and sick leave
- Leave programs, including parental, pregnancy health, medical, and bereavement leave
What Makes Cloudflare Special?
We're not just a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company. We're a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company with a soul. Fundamental to our mission to help build a better Internet is protecting the free and open Internet.
Project Galileo: Since 2014, we've equipped more than 2,400 journalism and civil society organizations in 111 countries with powerful tools to defend themselves against attacks that would otherwise censor their work, technology already used by Cloudflare's enterprise customers-at no cost.
Athenian Project: In 2017, we created the Athenian Project to ensure that state and local governments have the highest level of protection and reliability for free, so that their constituents have access to election information and voter registration. Since the project, we've provided services to more than 425 local government election websites in 33 states.
1.1.1.1: We released 1.1.1.1 to help fix the foundation of the Internet by building a faster, more secure and privacy-centric public DNS resolver. This is available publicly for everyone to use - it is the first consumer-focused service Cloudflare has ever released. Here's the deal - we don't store client IP addresses never, ever. We will continue to abide by our privacy commitment and ensure that no user data is sold to advertisers or used to target consumers.
Sound like something you'd like to be a part of? We'd love to hear from you!
Please note that applicants who progress to the offer stage of the interview process may be asked to attend an in-person interview within one of the Cloudflare Offices or Cloudflare Hubs. More details about this will be available at that stage of the interview process.
This position may require access to information protected under U.S. export control laws, including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations. Please note that any offer of employment may be conditioned on your authorization to receive software or technology controlled under these U.S. export laws without sponsorship for an export license.
Cloudflare is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunity for all people and place great value in both diversity and inclusiveness. All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to their, or any other person's, perceived or actual race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, family care status, or any other basis protected by law. We are an AA/Veterans/Disabled Employer.
Cloudflare provides reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities. Please tell us if you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job. Examples of reasonable accommodations include, but are not limited to, changing the application process, providing documents in an alternate format, using a sign language interpreter, or using specialized equipment. If you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job, please contact us via e-mail at hr@cloudflare.com or via mail at 101 Townsend St. San Francisco, CA 94107.
See All 247+ Principal Engineer Jobs in Austin
Find roles in Austin that match your experience and apply in just a few clicks.
Find Principal Engineer JobsPrincipal Engineer Job Market in Austin
Who's Hiring
- CesiumAstro24
- Cadence21
- NVIDIA17
- AMD14
- Electric Power Engineers14
Top Industries Hiring
- Electronics & Hardware35
- Technology & Software10
- Education7
- Automotive3
- Manufacturing3
Principal Engineer Jobs in Austin: Frequently Asked Questions
How do I get a principal engineer job in Austin?
Target Austin's densest hiring clusters: semiconductor and chip design firms near the Domain, enterprise software companies downtown, and the growing clean energy and defense contractors south of the city. Candidates with hands-on distributed systems or embedded hardware experience stand out locally. Networking through Austin's active tech meetup scene and reaching out directly to engineering leaders at mid-size product companies often opens doors faster than applying cold.
Which companies hire principal engineers in Austin?
Employers hiring principal engineers in Austin right now include CesiumAstro, Cadence, and NVIDIA, based on current listings on Migrate Mate as of August 2026. Austin attracts a wide mix of large semiconductor manufacturers, high-growth SaaS companies, and defense and aerospace contractors, all actively competing for senior engineering talent.
Are there remote principal engineer jobs in Austin?
Yes, though availability depends heavily on the specialization. Software-focused principal engineer roles tend to offer remote or hybrid flexibility, while hardware, semiconductor, and lab-based positions almost always require on-site presence. About 45% of principal engineer openings tied to Austin are remote or hybrid as of August 2026. Architecture, systems design, and cross-team technical leadership work is where remote arrangements are most common among Austin employers.
How can I get a principal engineer job in Austin with little or no experience?
The most realistic path in Austin is landing a senior software or systems engineer role at a mid-size product company and building toward principal from there. Austin's semiconductor firms and defense contractors also run structured rotation and apprenticeship programs that develop engineers into principal-level contributors over two to four years. Contributing to open-source projects that local Austin engineering teams actively use, and engaging with the UT Austin and ACC alumni networks, helps surface opportunities that aren't publicly posted.
Which industries hire the most principal engineers in Austin?
The sectors hiring the most principal engineers in Austin are Electronics & Hardware, Technology & Software, and Education, based on current listings on Migrate Mate as of August 2026. Austin's position as a semiconductor manufacturing hub and a magnet for enterprise software investment drives sustained demand for senior engineering talent across both product and infrastructure roles.
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See All 247+ Principal Engineer Jobs in Austin
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