Senior Data Scientist, Detection

Location: New York

About the Role

Cloudflare’s Engineering Team is home to some of the industry’s top engineers, dedicated to building and scaling innovative software that handles a huge proportion of the Internet. Our Detection department sits at the heart of that mission: we identify automated, fraudulent, and malicious activity across the Internet and through our gateway. We develop advanced detection systems and machine learning models that operate at scale, collaborating with Product and Engineering teams across the company to protect our customers and stay ahead of the constantly evolving threat landscape.

Responsibilities

• Research, design, and evaluate detection models that identify automated, fraudulent, and malicious activity across Internet‑scale data.
• Dig into massive datasets to uncover the patterns and behaviors that distinguish adversaries from legitimate users.
• Define how detection success is measured, designing metrics and evaluation strategies for problems where ground truth is noisy, delayed, or contested.
• Stay current on emerging AI/ML research and evaluate how new techniques (e.g., LLMs, generative AI) can be applied to our products.
• Partner with ML Engineers, Data Engineers, and Product to take detection approaches from research to production and measure their real‑world impact.

Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience

• Fraud and bots at scale. You have experience across fraud, abuse, and/or bot detection on large, high‑velocity traffic. You may focus on one, but you transfer instincts between them.
• Strong fundamentals, fluent in data. You have solid applied statistics, machine learning, and AI methodology fundamentals. You choose the right technique for the problem, and are fluent with large‑scale data.
• You have at least 5‑7 years of experience professionally working in Data Science, ML Engineering, or Software Engineering.
• You are very comfortable with Python & SQL in production environments.

Bonus Points

• At home in ground truth ambiguity. Building detections when ground truth is scarce is the heart of this job. You make real progress with weak, delayed, or absent labels and you’re energized by adversaries that fight back.
• You don’t burn signals. You understand (or are curious to learn) how to act on detections without tipping your hand, knowing that how you deploy and respond can erode your future visibility.
• Pragmatic about complexity. You know when a simple solution beats a complex one, and you don’t chase small gains at disproportionate cost.
• Disciplined in code. You apply strong programming and engineering best practices in both research and production code.
• Impact‑driven and clear. You connect your work to business impact and communicate clearly across technical and non‑technical stakeholders.

Compensation

Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.

• For New York City based hires: Estimated annual salary of $185,000 - $231,000.

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

  Equal Opportunity & Accessibility

  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 or via mail at 101 Townsend St. San Francisco, CA 94107.