Senior Distributed Systems Engineer

About the role

At Cloudflare, we’re not looking for people who wait for a polished roadmap; we’re looking for the builders who see the cracks in the Internet that everyone else has simply learned to live with. We value candidates who have the instinct to spot a "normalized" problem and the AI-native curiosity to create a solution using the latest tools. Our culture is built on iteration,

What you’ll do

• Design, build, and operate backend services that enforce regional boundaries on where customer data is stored, processed, and decrypted, across a globally distributed edge network.
• Contribute to end-to-end feature delivery — write technical designs and RFCs, implement services and libraries, add tests and observability, drive rollout, and own the resulting systems in production.
• Partner with engineers on adjacent platforms, cryptography, networking, data, and product teams to integrate residency guarantees into new and existing surfaces without regressing performance or reliability for other customers.
• Reason carefully about failure modes, consistency, and blast radius; design systems that fail closed for compliance while degrading gracefully for availability, and make these tradeoffs explicit in design docs.
• Participate in on-call for your services, lead incident response and post-mortems, and continually invest in reliability, capacity planning, and cost.
• Raise the engineering bar through code review, mentorship, and clear written communication; contribute to the team's engineering standards and tooling.

What they’re looking for

Select a requirement to inspect fit, evidence or application context.

• 5+ years of professional experience designing, building, and operating production distributed systems at scale.
• Strong proficiency in at least one system or backend language such as Go, Rust, or C/C++, and a willingness to work in others as the codebase demands.
• Solid grasp of distributed systems fundamentals, including:
• Consistency and consensus models (strong, sequential, eventual; Paxos / Raft at a conceptual level).
• Replication, sharding, and partitioning strategies, and their tradeoffs against availability and latency.
• Failure modes: partial failure, network partitions, split brain, clock skew, and how these show up in real systems.
• Idempotency, retries, backpressure, timeouts, circuit breakers, and rate limiting as first-class design concerns.
• Health checking, failure detection, leader election, and graceful degradation.
• Observability: metrics, logs, and tracing as design inputs, not afterthoughts.
• Practical experience with API design (REST or gRPC), relational databases, and asynchronous messaging or event streaming systems, with a clear understanding of transactional and consistency boundaries.
• Comfortable with AI-assisted development tooling, with the judgment to use it to accelerate work while remaining accountable for correctness, security, and design quality
• Track record of production ownership: on-call, incident response, post-mortems, and continuous investment in reliability and performance.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills; ability to write clear design documents and collaborate effectively across time zones.

Benefits & working conditions

• Cloudflare offers a complete package of benefits and programs to support you and your family. Our benefits programs can help you pay health care expenses, support caregiving, build capital for the future and make life a little easier and fun! The below is a description of our benefits for employees in the United States, and benefits may vary for employees based outside the U.S.
• Medical/Rx Insurance
• Dental Insurance
• Vision Insurance
• Flexible Spending Accounts
• Commuter Spending Accounts
• Fertility & Family Forming Benefits
• On-demand mental health support and Employee Assistance Program
• Global Travel Medical Insurance
• Short and Long Term Disability Insurance
• Life & Accident Insurance
• 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan
• Employee Stock Participation Plan