Cloudflare Security Research Analyst at Cloudflare researching web application attacks and developing managed WAF rules. Analyzes vulnerabilities and exploits to improve protection for millions of Internet properties.
Responsibilities
We are looking for a Security Research Analyst to research web application threats and develop the managed rules that protect Cloudflare customers. You will turn public CVEs, threat intelligence, customer reports, and internal telemetry into tested, effective mitigations.
Your work will span the detection lifecycle: understanding an exploit, designing a rule, validating it against malicious and legitimate requests, and measuring its behavior in production. You will collaborate with engineering and research partners to close coverage gaps and continuously improve the quality of our WAF protections.
Research vulnerabilities and exploitation. Analyze public CVEs, proof-of-concept exploits, and observed attacks to understand root causes, exploit chains, and opportunities for WAF mitigation.
Develop and maintain managed rules. Design, test, and deploy WAF managed rules and exploit signatures, keeping protections effective as applications, exploits, and attacker techniques evolve.
Investigate false positives and missed attacks. Analyze customer reports and request telemetry, reproduce issues, and refine detections to improve protection without unnecessarily blocking legitimate traffic.
Validate coverage and resistance to bypasses. Use targeted penetration testing, exploit variants, and adversarial testing to identify detection gaps and evaluate proposed mitigations.
Automate research and validation. Build tools and reproducible test cases that accelerate exploit analysis, rule validation, regression testing, and traffic analysis.
Measure detection quality. Use SQL, dashboards, and production data to assess rule efficacy, track attack trends, and guide improvements to coverage, false-positive rates, and performance.
Collaborate across teams. Partner with Engineering, Product, and other detection teams to deliver reliable protections and resolve recurring customer problems at their roots.
Share actionable research. Document findings, explain mitigation decisions, and contribute to internal research reports and public-facing blogs on vulnerabilities and Internet-wide attack trends.
Additional Experience We Value
Experience developing WAF rules or contributing to open-source WAF projects, such as ModSecurity or the OWASP Core Rule Set.
Qualification
You understand HTTP/HTTPSYou work effectively with engineers
Required
You have hands-on experience in web application security, vulnerability research, or detection engineering, including writing and improving WAF rules, exploit signatures, or comparable detection logic.
You understand HTTP/HTTPS, how web applications and proxies process requests, and common vulnerability classes such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting, remote code execution, SSRF, and insecure deserialization.
You can analyze a vulnerability advisory or proof of concept, reproduce the exploit in a controlled environment, and identify the request characteristics that distinguish exploitation from legitimate traffic.
You use SQL to investigate large datasets and a language such as Python, Go, or Rust to build research tools, automate analysis, and validate detections.
You make evidence-based tradeoffs between detection coverage, false positives, and performance. You are comfortable investigating ambiguous reports and following issues through to resolution.
You work effectively with engineers, product partners, and customer-facing teams, and communicate technical findings clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
You use AI fluently in research and coding workflows and have the judgment to know where it accelerates the work and where its outputs need independent validation.
You are curious about how attackers exploit web applications and bypass defenses. You do not need to know our exact stack, but you should be eager to go deep in the domain.