Cloudflare | SSE | Bangalore | March 2026
- Location
- Bangalore
- Experience
- 4 years
- Posted
- 14 Apr 2026
Summary
I interviewed for an SSE role at Cloudflare in Bangalore, completing several rounds that included behavioral, two system‑design onsite interviews, a debugging/code‑review session, and senior leadership discussions, and I ultimately declined the offer.
How it went
Cloudflare has started aggresively hiring in Bangalore as they have plans on expanding engineering teams in India. I came across a job post on linkedin and applied, the recruiter reached out and the interview loop started. The rounds are listed in chronological order.
Virtual HM round (30 mins, elimination) - A generic HM round where we discussed about my goals, my previous work, and then the interviewer asked some generic behavioral questions.
Onsite 1 (90 mins) - This was supposed to be a purely coding round, but the interviewer gave me a design problem - Design a batch processing system which will ingest support tickets data and use 3rd party LLM provider to summarise it + some pseudo code on how we will do rate limiting.
Onsite 2 (60 mins) - Design a distributed system which will allow users to ping an http endpoint on a schedule.
At this point, I thought that the interviews were over, and I will get an offer since all the rounds went really well, but then the HM dropped a bomb on me by saying that there will be 3 more virtual rounds - debugging/code review, senior leadership round, and C-suite round.
Virtual 3rd round (90 mins) - Debugging and code review with senior engineer. The round was pretty easy, the interviewer gave me a code snippet and asked me to review it and point out gaps. Then we moved on to discussing how we will debug performance issues in a distributed system.
Virtual 4th round (45 mins) - Senior leadership round, the recruiter told me that this will mostly be a behavioral round, and an oppotunity for me to talk to senior leadership about cloudflare. However the interview revolved completely around how I use GenAI/Coding Agents in my day to day work, what types of tools that I use, what are some shortcomings of coding agents, etc.
At this point, the recruiter gave me the rough numbers for SSE role, 80K$ RSU over 4 years + 60L base, first year comp ~79L. I declined the offer as I had better offer from Google worth 85L. Note: If I had said yes, the recruiter would have scheduled the C-suite round (scheduling it takes around 2 weeks), where there's a 10-15% chance that you might not get an offer.
My YOE - 4
Current TC - 54L
Questions asked (2)
- 01
Design Batch Processing System for Support Tickets with LLM Summarization
System Design
Design a batch processing system which will ingest support tickets data and use a 3rd‑party LLM provider to summarize it. Include pseudo‑code or architecture details on how you would implement rate limiting for the LLM calls.
- 02
Design Distributed Scheduled Ping Service
System Design
Design a distributed system that allows users to schedule a ping to an HTTP endpoint at specified times or intervals. Consider scalability, reliability, and how the system stores and triggers scheduled pings.