Cloudflare: Growth, culture & AI in recruitment (and 11 years of Project Galileo)

We get well over a million applications per year and we're trying to receive over two million applications just in 2025 alone. But one of the things that has persisted at Cloudflare is that our culture actually has been able to shine through and the good parts of our culture have persisted at Cloudflare. Folks that we hire at Cloudflare are able to get things done. And also are strong collaborators. They're curious, look for ways to enhance our products and services. Hi everyone and welcome to This Week in NET. It's Friday, June the 13th, 2025 edition. And this week we're going to talk about recruitment in a tech company like Cloudflare. So it's a packed episode. For that, we're talking with Scott Tomtania. He is leading recruitment here at Cloudflare and we'll get into how we hire, what we look for and how recruitment is evolving in general in tech companies. Then we'll shift gears to talk about Project Galileo, a special project here at Cloudflare that's celebrating 11 years. We'll have Jocelyn Woolbright to talk about how Cloudflare has been helping NGOs, journalists and vulnerable groups to stay online for over a decade. Before that, we go into some of the news of the week. One is sad. Bill Atkinson, Macintosh pioneer and inventor of HyperCard has passed away at 74. Atkinson was Apple employee number 51, one of the original members of the Macintosh team. And really his work shaped how we interact with computers today. Also this week was Apple's WWDC with several announcements. We won't go into that specifically. Also from our Cloudflare blog, there's some news. We have a blog post about how we added support for finalization registry in Cloudflare Workers, our developers platform. But just because you can use it doesn't mean you should actually. There's also a blog post about building an AI agent that puts humans in the loop with Knock and Cloudflare's agents as the key. So plenty to see and read. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Scott Tamtarian. Hello, Scott. Hello, João. Very nice to meet you. I'm super excited to be right here in Lisbon, Portugal, one of our flagship offices and one of our two main hubs in Europe. So glad to be here. And welcome to Lisbon. Usually you're based in San Francisco. Yes. Today you're in Lisbon. Absolutely. So we can do this in person. Absolutely. Usually I'm based in San Francisco, the San Francisco Bay Area. Lisbon is an amazing city. Just the beauty is stunning here and the people are great. The food is also absolutely spectacular. Why not start with a bit of your experience? You've been at Cloudflare for several years. You've done recruiting. You've done different jobs at recruiting in our people's team. Can you guide us through a bit on when did you join and your initial path and also current path at Cloudflare? Great. So I joined Cloudflare seven and a half years ago. When I joined, Cloudflare was primarily based in San Francisco, London, Singapore as the main hubs. And I'm not exactly sure, but I think we were probably roughly between 400 and 500 employees. And fast forward, seven and a half years later, we're north of 4 ,500 or so employees at Cloudflare. And we have a number of hubs in the United States. And we successfully launched Lisbon at the tail end of 2019. And currently, I believe we have over 350 employees in Lisbon and well over 400 employees in the entire country here in Portugal. It's been such a great journey to be part of an iconic company that's changing the trajectory of the Internet and helping make the Internet really, really better. Even beyond that, I'm sure you can hear the excitement in my voice. I'm still very excited about Cloudflare's future and what the future holds overall for every single person who's at Cloudflare. Fun fact, I joined four years ago and you were actually the recruiting person for me. We exchanged texts. We talked a bit at the time. And I could feel the process at the time when I joined four years ago. In your experience, first, what has it been like working at Cloudflare for this seven years, right? And what changed in the company? You mentioned the growth. Many more people now. But what is the biggest change, you would say? I think the biggest change at Cloudflare has been that in the past several years, we've added more stage-appropriate leaders that have seen larger scale before, have built big companies that come from iconic companies to our ranks. Not that we didn't have that before, but now Cloudflare is way more recognizable. Then it was before. So that's the number one change. The second change that I've seen at Cloudflare is that we are now truly a global brand. It's incredibly fascinating, really a global brand. And I have to admit that initially when I was interviewing at Cloudflare, I didn't know much about Cloudflare at all. Personally, I had to do some research and the more I started to get to know the individuals I was interviewing with and leaders, I really got super excited about Cloudflare. But now we get well over a million applications per year, and we're trying to receive over 2 million applications just in 2025 alone. So more recognizable brands. But one of the things that has persisted at Cloudflare is that our culture actually has been able to shine through and the good parts of our culture have persisted at Cloudflare. Folks that we hire at Cloudflare are able to get things done. And also our strong collaborators. They're curious, look for ways to enhance our products and services. And that's something that has persisted, and that's something that has even acutely been developed as we've scaled as a company. I'm curious, you mentioned a lot of applications every year, over a million now. Closer to a million. Closer to 2 million? Yes. Per year? Per year. That's a lot. I heard Matti saying that last year, I think. And it's really amazing to see how many people now know Cloudflare and want to join Cloudflare. But how, in terms of the recruitment process, how do you deal with that many applications and how do you select the people? The great question. So at Cloudflare, we firmly believe that our hiring managers play an instrumental part in the recruiting process. And that example is really showcased by Matthew Prince and Michelle, our co-founders, and the senior executive team who spent upwards of 20%, 25%, or 30% of their time in the hiring process. In fact, every single person that joins us has a C-level interview with one of them. Spend 20 minutes with them. They can ask them any question. I don't think there's a company on Earth that does that. It is absolutely amazing. Every single candidate that has that conversation leaves the conversation really inspired by the mission and also the access that they have. And also, they get an insight into our culture. So that part of the process is absolutely awesome that you get to experience the hiring manager early and they're deeply involved in the process, as well as the rest of the leadership team. What we do at Cloudflare, we have job descriptions. And we try to provide a ton of clarity around what exactly we're looking for, what we're building. And we provide clarity on our interview process. We have you meet with a number of team members, including cross-functional team members and partners within the team that you'll be spending a lot of time with, so that you get a good insight into who we are. We firmly also believe that we're interviewing you as much as you're interviewing us at Cloudflare. And we want you to have the best possible experience when you're going through the process. But of course, two million applications, not everyone will join. If not, we will be a very large company. But the process of selecting, it also helps to have leadership in that process, giving opinions, asking questions also plays a role. It does play a role. So to break that into a couple of different sections, for some of the more technical roles, you have to showcase your technical ability by going through coding exercises. And for some of the other teams, you have to go through some case studies and answer some questions there. So there's definitely some testing involved in the process, at many levels of the process. And there's a lot of one-on-one interviews involved in it. And at the core of it, really, we want to understand your background. Working done before, that would make sense for us to be able to attract you here. And we're looking for some of the best of the best fun facts for you. So it's harder to get to Cloudflare than it is to get into Harvard. Also on the selection process. Also a lot of people applying worldwide, also playing a role. Exactly. That's interesting. The specifics of being in the process, did that evolve? You explained that still, till today, the process has a C-level person doing the interview as well, participating in the process. The number of interviews that are done, did that change? Yes. So that did change. So when you're a smaller, relatively smaller company, it's very important to have almost everyone linked with their candidates. Because it's just a small office, small teams. So one hire represents a significant increase in percentage in terms of the head count. But when you're a larger team and you're scaling, then you have to create a repeatable process and that you can measure and that can help you also move the process forward in a timely manner. So the actual number of interviews have been scaled back. But at the same time, the rigor of the interviews have been maintained and have been more prescriptive to be able to achieve the same results. Specifically on the current process, how do we deal with the new challenges? For example, are we using AI in any way in the recruiting process? There was in the news a few weeks ago, actually, a student that was applying to a job and he was using AI to code, to masquerade that a bit. Some of those things are in your mind in terms of the screening process? What is top of mind? Absolutely, AI. So we are looking at various tools, AI tools that can help us remain more productive. That's one. Also help us nail the selection process. And at the same time, make our hiring manager's jobs easier. We also know that there's a lot of risk associated with it. And the great thing about it is that Cloudflare is perfectly positioned internally to be able to help the recruiting team really make the right selection or even build something internally for us to be able to use that really matches the Cloudflare vision and philosophy for AI. So when I think about AI, I think about two things. I'm really fortunate that I get to think about AI while I'm at Cloudflare because we're well positioned to deal with it. And the second thing is I'm always thinking already about what's out there and the problem set and challenges that AI will solve from the recruiting perspective. So those two things. And Kafka is just incredibly well positioned for that. Thinking of someone that just left college, just left a job or wants to move jobs, if I want to apply to Cloudflare, what would be the first approach, but also what you should be focused on in terms of what you should be showing to us to be hired? Great. So another fun fact, at Cloudflare, we don't just hire engineers and product managers. We hire sales professionals. We hire product managers. We hire engineers. We hire customer support professionals. We hire HR professionals. So there are many roles across different spectrums and different teams at Cloudflare. So if you're an intern or you're a recent college graduate and you're looking for the job at Cloudflare, I'll give you two assignments to do. One, familiarize yourself with Cloudflare and our products on our website. Two, we have several segments of Cloudflare team that really do a good job telling you about the history of Cloudflare and also exposing you to some of the leaders and also exposing you to the culture and the hiring process. So pay attention to that. Do that researching. Thirdly, just go on LinkedIn, get your profile right, get your CV right, and apply for a role at Cloudflare. When in doubt, reach out to us at careers at Cloudflare. We have a number of folks that reach out to us there. You wouldn't believe it, but the last time I checked, we have hundreds of folks that reach out on any given day or any given week at Cloudflare. And we were able to help guide them to where they need to get to go. In terms of characteristics, for example, I remember Matthew even explaining that being curious, being driven, being passionate about actually learning about the company and realizing the goals and realizing, hey, I can contribute. Those type of things usually resonate well in interview. Yes, absolutely. So those are really the traits of the overarching traits of individuals that we look for at Cloudflare. Curiosity ranks high. Empathy ranks or runs high. Humility runs high. Transparency also runs high. And also the ability to be able to get things done and be productive rank really, really high at Cloudflare. So if you're curious, you do your research about Cloudflare and learn more about the products, learn about the hiring managers, and you'll be able to prep well. Fun fact, in the middle of the pandemic in 2022, we did something really cool at Cloudflare. While other companies were scaling back their internship programs or canceling internship programs, we decided to double our internship program. And when I speak with current college students or career services at several different campuses, they still remember this. At Cloudflare, we doubled its internship program in the middle of the pandemic. So we're always looking for great talent, great interns that have done amazing things here that became great employees at Cloudflare. So we're on the lookout, as always. In terms of the years of process that you've been here watching and participating, what were even the main challenges that you realized maybe that led to changes? What were those specifically? So great results never really materialize with challenges. The first challenge is being able to hire in some of the countries where we're going in. When you're new in a country, it's hard to... No one really knows you there. It's hard to know what great talent is. So part of what we do is we leverage our Cloudflare population. We're incredibly diverse from many different countries. So we solicit a lot of referrals. We also solicit a lot of referrals from our network to be able to do that. But it's hard initially to know who's who in every country. But you want to make sure you hire some of the best in those countries that can represent the company really well. And then in turn, you're able to attract great talent in those countries. That's one. Number two, one of the challenges was once we started to receive a lot of applications, that became a big challenge. How do we ensure that we are selecting the right individuals? How do we make sure that we're getting back to candidates in a timely manner? Those are still ongoing challenges that we're solving for. That's a challenge of success, right? Exactly. And that's something, a case study for AI that we would love to bring to the table to be able to do. Makes sense. Since I joined, one of the things I find really interesting is that as a tech company that's getting some scale, there are still a lot of folks from seven years, 10 years, 13 years, didn't connect to our new CDO. It's 13 years at the company now. And it's a 14, 15 years company. So I can find interesting that many people stay on, but also, of course, it's a growing company. So there's more people coming in than the ones that stay on for sure. So there's this novelty aspect. But also, I find really interesting that some folks that were at the company sometimes return to the company. There's actually a connection that stays on. Boomerangs. Boomerangs, yes. Yes, you're absolutely right. I feel, I don't think I have the data on this, but I feel like I've been at a number of tech companies, but I feel that I've seen more folks from the early stage of the Cloudflare stay here longer than at other tech companies that were much smaller back then. And it's a testament to what we're building. It's also a testament to the culture and a testament to the future of Cloudflare. And I was just having a conversation with my team members here in Lisbon, and one of them said, Scott, you still seem quite excited about Cloudflare. I'm like, yeah, I am excited about Cloudflare. You've been here for that long. Yes, you still have the energy. Yes, because I see the excitement and the future of Cloudflare, and that's what brings me to Cloudflare. And the leaders that we get to work with are just world -class leaders, and I would want anyone else to experience what I've experienced at Cloudflare. Quite interesting also to see the way that the company has grown. You've been part of that, and you've known many folks that were hired. Some, you hire them, and now they're here for a few years. How is that relation in terms of hiring so many folks from the company, knowing them, actually understanding the culture of the company because of that as well? How do you feel the culture of the company specifically, even thinking of hiring? So I don't think I know everyone. These days, I used to try to. Too many people, of course. Exactly. You would have an award that you knew, a big award. But I think I started to do something this week in this, and I would say hi to every single person that I see in the hallway, and I would introduce myself. And I realized that, wow, not everyone knew. But then I would ask them who their recruiter was, and they would tell me the name of the recruiter, and that made me happy. They were actually quite excited to tell me the name of the recruiter. And so I've been introducing myself to every single person, and I'm on a mission to do that if I get to go to all the different offices to be able to do that. And I ask them what they do, and the minute they start to show what they're doing, and they're building, I can see the excitement. And what I also see is that everyone is approachable. Everyone is exhibiting the culture that you and I just discussed. Empathy, embellishment, curiosity. Curiosity. They're asking me what I do. They're also saying hi to me. So the culture persists, and a good part of the culture is also being maintained. Sometimes when companies are scaling, I've been a part of a couple of tech companies, people want to maintain the early culture or protect the early culture. This is my personal opinion. Too protective, in a sense. Yeah, too protective. I feel like if something doesn't get better, it eventually loses its team. So it's important not to protect it, but it's important to make it better so that we can continue to scale and maintain the great parts of the protocol. It should be vibrant in terms of it could be added to the culture. There's typically a base, but it could be added, changed, new people, new leaderships. So it makes perfect sense. Being still is not a good place. It is not. There's an old African saying that you don't want to swim in a still water. You don't want to touch it. You don't want to drink it because there's no outlet. There's no inlet. So I think it rings true for culture. Makes sense. Thinking of recruitment in 2025, what's coming in the area in general, in the tech sector? You've been through this, like the slowdown in the tech sector, in the hiring, the pandemic, which was not slowdown, was actually speeding up. But now it's a moment of stability, I would say. What do you see in the recruitment area in terms of the future that is coming, new trends? So first of all, I'd like to mention that at Koffler, we now have defined our core hubs. Of course, we still have teams that are distributed, but we're concentrating on hiring in Lisbon, London, for example, in Europe. There are other teams across the board in Munich, Paris, everywhere else, but our two hubs in Europe are in London and Lisbon. And if you're watching this, come join us. Other companies are forcing their employees to go back completely. That's not what Koffler is doing. We're doing something slightly different from that. In fact, completely different from that. Very innovative approach to this. So that's very exciting. Number two, in the industry overall, I think everyone has AI on their mind. Every recruiting team has AI on their mind. That's one. Could a recruitment person be AI initially, for example? So this takes me back to the early days of, I remember Monster.com coming up. This is my own view on this. And CareerBuilder and some of the job sites and LinkedIn. I think the early questions were, wow, the world is going to need recruiters. My answer to that is we are going to need recruiters that know how to leverage AI. We will need to have hiring teams that know how to leverage AI. AI will make jobs easier, will help us be more productive, will give us more insight into many different aspects that we're looking to gain insight into. Very similar to the early era of Monster.com or CareerBuilder, where now it wasn't that you were dropping your CV front of a company or at the reception desk, but you were going online and putting your CV there, and a recruiter is finding that and reaching out to you. So I feel like that's going to be sort of like the same shift that happens. But I'm not always right. So perhaps I'm off in this. To be honest, I don't think anyone knows for sure anything at this point. Things are changing so fast. It's difficult to predict. Absolutely. But it makes sense. I feel that having the human element will always be important, even if that human element has help of AI. I completely agree. Makes perfect sense, in my opinion. Because the human typically also can read things differently. It's even a process better for the other person at the other end, having a human typically, which makes sense. Last but not least, do you have a favorite part of Lisbon, food in Lisbon, favorite part in the Lisbon office? Why not? My favorite part in the Lisbon office is the Commons area. The views are amazing. I'll start from there. And you can see the majestic beauty of Lisbon. You can actually get a sense of how inviting the city is, and how just stunning the city is. My favorite food, my favorite part of Lisbon, there is a restaurant. I can't quite remember the name here, but it's in downtown Lisbon. And they serve the best, in my opinion, the best grouper. Fish. Yeah. And I heard that that's a local preferred fish in Lisbon. There's a lot of fish. There's a lot of fish in Lisbon. Codfish. There's a lot of fish we love, depending on the person you ask, to be honest. And then I've come to enjoy bread and olives with everything in Lisbon. More importantly, I think it's the people that I really enjoy. Probably some of the friendliest and very helpful folks I've ever met, I think, in our Lisbon office, as well in the city of Lisbon. Yeah, makes sense. You were mentioning the hubs. In Lisbon, it's a hub. Well, that means we have a big, interesting Clalflare office here. The same in London, Austin, San Francisco, and New York in a few weeks. Yes, I'm hearing. Rumors about that. And Mexico as well. Mexico City, Singapore. Singapore, for sure. But we have people all over. We have people in Japan. We have people in Australia. We have people you were mentioning in other parts of Europe. We have people in Paris. We have people in the Netherlands as well. It's quite interesting to see even the distribution part. But thinking specifically of these hubs, what do you think, especially the more new ones, what do you think the outside of the U.S. perspective brings to Clalflare? Sometimes I call Clalflare a bit of the Netflix of tech companies in the way that Netflix does shows externally. They do, of course, in the U.S., but they have popular shows in Germany that are worldwide or in other places. What do you feel about the hubs that are outside of the U.S. and the Clalflare culture? The very interesting part about this is that every single hub I've been to or visited has a collection of people from all over the world. In Lisbon, I was just grabbing coffee and I heard an American accent, a South African accent, a British accent. It's just really fascinating. And then at the same time, it has the Portuguese flair to it. Even in the office, when you go to London, it's quite the same thing. So I feel that we're an incredibly diverse company when it comes to nationalities and cultures. Each hub has its flair, its flavor. You feel it when you get there. But at the same time, our collection of talent from all parts of the world. And I firmly believe that that's one of our secret sauce at Clalflare, to be able to attract the best and brightest from all parts of the world, all walks of life, incredibly diverse talent pool. This makes perfect sense. It is a good note to end. Yes. Thank you, Scott. Thank you, João. And obrigado. Obrigado. And that's a wrap. Thank you. Hi, my name is Jocelyn. I'm a program lead on the Clalflare Impact Team. I've been at Clalflare for about five years. And really, my job is working with non-profit organizations to provide them with Clalflare services. And really, the way that we do that is with one of our largest projects, which is called Project Galileo. So if you're unfamiliar, we started Project Galileo in 2014. And it was really this idea of providing free cybersecurity tools to organizations that are seeing many different types of attacks because of the work that they're doing. So over the last 11 years of the project, we've been working with about 3,000 different organizations in about 120 countries to provide free Clalflare services to make sure that they have the tools and cybersecurity products available to keep them online. A lot of times, these organizations are just seeing these very common types of cyber attacks against their websites, but they don't have the expertise to really know how to keep their website safe. They're really the ones that work at non-profits that wear many different hats. So for example, you'll have a member that's managing their organization's website while also managing their volunteers, their CFO for their non -profit. So for this year's anniversary, we have done a couple of different things. One of them is we've actually expanded our commitment to providing services to organizations with two new civil society partners that are based in APAC, so Asia Pacific. We have Engage Media, and we also have the Open Culture Foundation in Taiwan. They're going to be able to help us identify exactly the civil society organizations in Asia Pacific that kind of need our services. And they're really two great organizations doing amazing work in the digital rights space. We also have about 10 new case studies from organizations that are protected under Project Galileo. They're telling their stories on how they use Cloudflare and exactly what that looks like for their specific area of expertise. So we have case studies from organizations in civil society, human rights, environmental organizations, and journalism in places like Serbia, the Netherlands, the United States, Moldova. So definitely check out those stories. Some amazing work that they're all doing, and we're really happy to kind of showcase exactly how they're using Cloudflare to stay online. And then kind of the biggest part about Project Galileo that we do for the anniversary is that we actually develop a radar dashboard, which provides a lot of insights into the types of attacks that many of these organizations under Project Galileo see on a day-to-day basis. So actually between May 1st and March 31st, 2025, we've actually blocked about 1.8 billion types of cyber threats against organizations protected under Project Galileo. Our data indicates that we're actually seeing this growing trend in DDoS attacks against organizations becoming more common than we see than attempts to exploit traditional web vulnerabilities. But with Cloudflare, it's really easy to be able to get onboarded and automatically be getting that protection. And we actually saw this with an attack that was against the Belarusian Investigative Center, which is an independent media organization that's based in Belarus, and they actually cover a lot of corruption cases in Belarus and Russia, for example. So they actually saw a DDoS attack on September 27th. And what happened is that attack actually generated over 28 billion requests in a single day. So on that day, they actually reached out to the Project Galileo team and we quickly onboarded them in this under-attack scenario, and we were able to mitigate against this attack once they were onboarded to Cloudflare. Another attack that I want to mention is actually an organization called Tech for Peace. So they're a human rights organization that's focused on digital rights in Iraq and also in the Middle East area. So they were actually targeted by a 12-day-long attack on March 10th, and that actually saw about 2.7 billion requests to their website. In previous reports that we've had for the Project Galileo radar dashboard, we've typically seen these attacks that are very high intensity and over a very short period of time. So one example of this is that we saw an attack against one of the largest independent media organizations in Russia called Meduza. So last year we saw an attack, it was over a seven-minute period, and it actually reached 7 million requests per second. So we really try to take this data, improve our products to make sure that the organizations that might not know exactly what types of threats are out there, they can automatically kind of be protected against the worst of the worst that we see here at Cloudflare. So we're really excited to be celebrating the 11th anniversary of Project Galileo.