Principal People Team Business Partner – R&D

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

What You Would Do Here

Cloudflare is growing our People team. Our focus is finding the best people to work at Cloudflare and then allowing them to do their best work. As we continue to scale our global organization, we are looking for a trusted Business Partner who is naturally curious about our technology, deeply invested in our business strategy, and driven to help our people thrive.

In this role, you will report to the Senior Director, People Team Business Partners and serve as a heavy-hitting strategic partner to our senior leadership across Product, Engineering and Security.

You won’t just execute HR programs; you will actively architect them. You will focus on macro-level organizational design, sophisticated talent management strategies, systemic change leadership, and workforce planning that aligns directly with our aggressive business goals. Moving at our pace brings a lot of change, complexity, and ambiguity-and a little bit of chaos. Cloudflarians thrive on that and are comfortable being uncomfortable. You will bring critical thought, deep business acumen, and a strong point of view to help our leaders navigate this unrelenting pace, transforming potential friction into high-impact execution.

Motivated by cultivating high-performance culture, building great businesses, and helping people do their best work, you are a seasoned, consultative People leader. You don’t just adapt to the future of work-you actively leverage modern tools and a relentless curiosity to shape it.

• Experienced & Proven:You have 12+ years of progressive experience on a People/HR team, with at least 3+ years operating as a principal business partner backing complex, fast-paced corporate functions.
• Business-First Strategist:You possess keen business acumen and effortlessly link HR strategy to commercial and operational outcomes. You think like a business leader who happens to specialize in people, always looking for ways to enable teams to hit their goals.
• Relentlessly Curious:You possess an innate curiosity about what we build, how our teams operate, and what makes our people tick. You dive deep into the data and the dynamics of your organizations to diagnose root causes rather than just treating symptoms.
• AI & Tech Savvy:You embrace modern innovation, utilizing AI and advanced digital tooling as strategic force multipliers. You leverage AI to enhance your personal productivity, streamline operational efficiency, and uncover data-driven insights that solve complex organizational challenges.(And yes, you still secretly love a sophisticated spreadsheet!)
• Architect of Change:You have a proven track record of leading large-scale change initiatives through highly ambiguous environments. You know what organizational complexity looks like and possess the resilience and resourcefulness to drive ideation into concrete action.
• Program Builder:You have built scalable, enterprise-grade programs from the ground up and have a demonstrated history of establishing immediate credibility and trust across all levels of a distributed, virtual organization.
• Empathic Influencer & Communicator:You lead with empathy but do not shy away from radical candor. You are a masterful communicator-whether presenting to executives, writing strategic proposals, or delivering difficult feedback face-to-face.
• High Integrity:Uncompromising when it comes to your ethics, you speak truth to power, act with deep respect, and lead with dignity.

Key Responsibilities

• Strategic Advisory:Act as a trusted advisor to R&D executive leadership, translating business objectives into long-term workforce strategies, organizational designs, and succession plans.
• Insight-Driven Problem Solving:Synthesize complex qualitative and quantitative data-leveraging AI-driven insights and engagement analytics-to proactively identify trends, mitigate risks, and design predictive people solutions.
• Change Leadership:Guide leadership and teams through structural evolutions, hyper-growth scaling, and shifting business priorities with minimal disruption to engagement and output.
• Talent & Capability Building:Partner with business leaders and People team Centers of Excellence (COEs) to design high-impact initiatives around talent development, performance elevation, and total rewards.

Time Off

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 released1.1.1.1to 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 ourprivacy commitmentand ensure that no user data is sold to advertisers or used to target consumers.