Cloudflare interns ship AI-assisted work across 48 teams
One year after setting a goal of hiring 1,111 interns, Cloudflare says more than 750 early-career builders have delivered work across 48 teams and nine offices. The company presents the program as evidence that AI can expand the impact of junior talent rather than replace it.
Radwan AbdulhadiEditor and technology writer
A larger internship bet
Cloudflare says it has hosted 750 internships during the year since it announced a plan to hire as many as 1,111 interns in 2026. The number refers to 1.1.1.1, the company’s public DNS resolver. The update comes as the company says many businesses were cutting intern and new-graduate hiring, while Cloudflare chose to expand its early-career program instead.
The internships have covered 48 teams in nine offices: Austin, San Francisco, London, Lisbon, New York, Singapore, Bengaluru, Washington, DC, and Sydney. Cloudflare says it is still hiring and intends to continue growing the program with another cohort, more participating teams and further work on how early-career employees can use AI effectively.
According to the company’s account on the Cloudflare Blog, interns joined active teams from their first day and were expected to leave behind a shipped product improvement, a better process, new infrastructure or an insight that changed how a team worked. Their output reached internal teams as well as millions of customers.
AI moved the starting line
Cloudflare describes AI as a central part of the internship program, but not as a substitute for learning or accountability. Interns used AI to understand unfamiliar codebases and systems, compare requirements with implementations, prototype ideas, automate repetitive work and move more quickly from a question to a working solution.
The company says the tools allowed interns to map new projects in days rather than weeks and create initial working scaffolds quickly. That left more time for questions that still require human judgment: what to build, who will use it, how to verify that it works and what might happen in production. Managers and mentors continued to set direction, review decisions and ensure that shipped work met Cloudflare’s standards.
The approach also extended beyond engineering. An internal audit intern built an AI-assisted pipeline for ISO compliance control testing and documentation. A product management intern worked on an API, dashboard and migration tooling for the company’s Startup Program credit management. Other interns improved background-verification workflows and investigated ways for customer support teams to use case descriptions to trigger troubleshooting commands.
Products built by interns
One project addressed the rising cost of storage and the need for more cache capacity. Cloudflare says intern Aashi built Cache Transcoding, which uses Zstandard to compress eligible assets inside the company’s primary proxy before writing them to disk. In initial testing, the assets averaged one-third of their original on-disk size, a result the company says could point to petabytes of effective cache capacity and less data moving between its data centers.
Intern contributions also reached the content system used by the company’s own publication. Noah joined Cloudflare as an intern and became the second maintainer of EmDash, contributing to its media library, content editor and administration interface. EmDash 1.0 shipped during Birthday Week, and the CMS now powers the blog where Cloudflare published its account of the internship program.
The company also highlighted intern-authored and intern-engineered work in several Birthday Week launches, including Protected Quick Tunnels, a stable EmDash release with a secure plugin registry, native Rust support in Workers through a new Emscripten target for wasm-bindgen, the BEACON real-user measurement system and a rebuilt Cloudflare Containers platform for agent sandboxes.
Preparing for post-quantum security
Several interns worked on Cloudflare’s preparations for post-quantum security, which the company is targeting for 2029. Tiago helped build CryptoLabe, an internal AI tool that finds cryptography across Cloudflare’s codebase and maps the systems that depend on it. The work is intended to address a basic challenge of migration: organizations cannot replace cryptography they have not identified.
Sophie helped bring per-connection post-quantum visibility to Logpush, Log Explorer and HTTP Traffic Analytics. Cloudflare says the changes let customers check their own progress toward post-quantum protection rather than relying only on an internal assessment.
Research beyond Cloudflare’s products
Some of the internship work focused on the wider Internet. Iliana measured how often networks rewrite BGP’s ORIGIN attribute to pull traffic toward themselves and found that it occurred on roughly 70% of observed paths, according to Cloudflare. She then publicly advocated removing ORIGIN from route selection altogether.
Iliana also tracked adoption of RFC 9234, which allows routers to reject route leaks on their own. Cloudflare presents the work as an example of how interns can contribute to Internet infrastructure by measuring a problem no single network owns, publishing the data and proposing a possible fix.
Beyond technical output, Cloudflare says interns took part in shared meals, volunteer activities and office events. Chief executive Matthew Prince hosted dinners with interns, while executives joined question-and-answer sessions on company strategy, technology, careers and the broader direction of the business. The company says many interns from the latest cohort are returning as full-time employees.
Sources
- Cloudflare BlogOne year later: the power of 1.1.1.1 interns
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