I was the 24th employee of Cloudflare and the first outside of San Francisco. Working out of my spare bedroom, I wrote a chunk of Cloudflare’s software before starting to recruit a team in London. Today, Cloudflare London, our EMEA headquarters, has more than 200 people working in the historic County Hall building opposite the Houses of Parliament. My spare bedroom is ancient history.

CC BY-SA 2.0 image by Sridhar Saraf

And Cloudflare didn’t stop at London. We now have people in Munich, Singapore, Beijing, Austin, TX, Chicago and Champaign, IL, New York, Washington, DC, San Jose, CA, Miami, FL, and Sydney, Australia, as well as San Francisco and London. And today we’re announcing the establishment of a new technical hub in Lisbon, Portugal. As part of that office opening I will be relocating to Lisbon this summer along with a small number of technical folks from other Cloudflare offices.

We’re recruiting in Lisbon starting today. Go here to see all the current opportunities. We’re looking for people to fill roles in Engineering, Security, Product, Product Strategy, Technology Research, and Customer Support.

CC BY-SA 2.0 Image by Rustam Aliyev

My first real idea of Lisbon dates to 30 years ago with the 1989 publication of John Le Carré’s The Russia House. As real, of course, as any Le Carré view of the world:

[...] ten years ago on a whim Barley Blair, having inherited a stray couple of thousand from a remote aunt, bought himself a scruffy pied-a-terre in Lisbon, where he was accustomed to take periodic rests from the burden of his many-sided soul. It could have been Cornwall, it could have been Provence or Timbuktu. But Lisbon by an accident had got him [...]

Cloudflare’s choice of Lisbon, however, came not by way of an accident but a careful search for a new continental European city in which to locate a technical office. I had been invited to Lisbon back in 2014 to speak at SAPO Codebits and been impressed by the size and range of technical talent present at the event. Subsequently, we looked at 45 cities across 29 countries, narrowing down to a final list of three.

Lisbon’s combination of a large and growing existing tech ecosystem, attractive immigration policy, political stability, high standard of living, as well as logistical factors like time zone (the same as the UK) and direct flights to San Francisco made it the clear winner.

Eu comecei a aprender Português há três meses... and I’m looking forward to discovering a country and a culture, and building a new technical hub for Cloudflare. We have found a thriving local technology ecosystem, supported both by the government and a myriad of exciting startups, and we look forward to collaborating with them to continue to raise Lisbon's profile.