Network Engineering Intern (Summer 2026)

Available Location: Austin, TX
Role Summary
Cloudflare operates one of the world's largest and most interconnected networks, spanning 335+ cities across every region of the globe. As a Network Engineering Intern on the Edge Network & Backbone team, you'll work under close mentorship from senior and principal network engineers on the real operational network that keeps that infrastructure running. From provisioning capacity to triaging faults, you'll be supported at every step by experienced engineers and AI-enabled tooling purpose-built for our network. This is a rare opportunity to enter the networking industry by gaining real experience with infrastructure that carries traffic for millions of websites and users - not a simulated lab environment.
Role Responsibilities

• Provision and configure network hardware and software as part of capacity expansion across Cloudflare's global edge network, following well-established playbooks under engineer guidance.
• Monitor network health and investigate non-urgent faults using Cloudflare's AI-enabled troubleshooting tooling, escalating where needed and documenting findings to help the broader team resolve issues faster.
• Triage and investigate network issues in collaboration with other internal teams, leveraging our internal tooling to accelerate diagnosis and resolution.
• Create and maintain operational documentation, runbooks, and knowledge-base articles that improve the efficiency of our team and tooling.
• Participate in structured troubleshooting sessions with senior engineers, building diagnostic skills across BGP, routing, and hardware faults in a production environment.
• Support network operations by contributing to shift handoffs, status updates, and incident tracking as part of the day-to-day ops rhythm.

Role Requirements (Must-Have Skills)

• Currently enrolled in or recently completed a degree in Networking, Computer Science, or a related technical discipline.
• Holds or is actively pursuing at least one industry networking certification (CCNA, JNCIA, or equivalent).
• Working knowledge of BGP and the OSI model, with the ability to reason through network problems layer by layer.
• Familiarity with at least one scripting language (Python, Bash, or similar), or demonstrated comfort using AI tools to write and adapt scripts for network automation tasks.
• Demonstrated ability to learn new technologies quickly, including vendor operating systems and internal tooling, under the guidance of a mentor.
• Strong written communication skills - you'll be writing documentation and ticket responses that engineers and customers will rely on.

Nice-to-Have Skills

• Hands-on experience with network operating systems across multiple vendors, such as Juniper, Cisco, or Arista.
• Understanding of anycast routing or how large-scale Internet networks distribute traffic.
• Experience with Linux system administration.
• Familiarity with optical transport technologies.
• Experience working in a customer-facing technical support environment.

A note on this role
This internship is deliberately operational in scope. You won't be handed a greenfield project to present at the end of the summer. Instead, you'll be embedded in a lean, high-trust team and expected to contribute to real infrastructure from week one. The upside: by the end of six months, you'll have hands-on production experience that most networking graduates take years to obtain. We're looking for candidates who see that as a feature, not a bug.
Internship Duration: 6 Months
Schedule: Full-time (3 days per week in office)
Compensation: 45/hr