Senior Software Engineer, Distributed Databases

Job Application for Senior Software Engineer, Distributed Databases at Cloudflare

Senior Software Engineer, Distributed Databases In-Office

About Us

At Cloudflare, we are on a mission to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world’s largest networks that powers millions of websites and other Internet properties for customers ranging from individual bloggers to SMBs to Fortune 500 companies. Cloudflare protects and accelerates any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. Internet properties powered by Cloudflare all have web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with every request. As a result, they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. Cloudflare was named to Entrepreneur Magazine’s Top Company Cultures list and ranked among the World’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company.

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, leveraging AI to ship faster today to make it better tomorrow, while ensuring that every improvement, no matter how small, is shared across the team to lift everyone up. If you’re the type of person who values curiosity over bureaucracy, and that AI is a partner in solving tough problems to keep the Internet moving forward, you’ll fit right in.

Locations: Austin, TX | Hybrid

About the Department

Emerging Technologies & Incubation (ETI) is where new and bold products are built and released within Cloudflare. Rather than being constrained by the structures which make Cloudflare a massively successful business, we are able to leverage them to deliver entirely new tools and products to our customers. Cloudflare’s edge and network make it possible to solve problems at massive scale and efficiency which would be impossible for almost any other organization.

About the Team

ETI's Storage Infrastructure team is responsible for the core storage layer that underpins many of ETI's stateful services. Our scope ranges from managing the physical hardware to operating the distributed databases and storage systems built upon it. We run this infrastructure globally across Cloudflare's network, which presents unique and complex engineering puzzles. We navigate efficiently expanding storage capacity, optimizing rebuild operations, and coordinating operations across failure domains to uphold durability. While other service teams focus on product development, our mission is to ensure the underlying storage is reliable, fast, and scalable.

You'll be joining a highly motivated team that is building the next generation of Cloudflare’s distributed storage services.

What You'll Do

In this role, you will own the distributed database systems that run across Cloudflare's edge network and power services such as R2, Durable Objects, and Workers KV. We expect you to go a layer deeper than a database operator to fix the underlying problems. You will own your code from inception through production rollout. On any given day, you might:

Add new features and extensions to the database to meet the needs of R2, Durable Objects, and Workers KV

Hold the bar on correctness through code review, testing, and staged rollout so defects are caught before customer impact

Tune performance and resource utilization across staged rollouts and production

Optimize data placement and replication for our edge topology, and partner with service teams on schema design and query performance

Build the observability and tooling that make the database supportable across its consumers

You can expect to interact with a variety of languages and technologies including Go, Rust, Saltstack, and Terraform.

Examples of Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience

Source-code level experience contributing to a distributed database or distributed storage system. Examples include distributed SQL databases (CockroachDB, TiDB / TiKV, YugabyteDB, Spanner), Raft-based or Paxos-based storage systems (etcd, FoundationDB), wide-column stores (Cassandra, ScyllaDB), document databases (MongoDB), or comparable systems

Strong programming skills in Go, Rust, C++, or another systems language, with a willingness to be productive in Go for this role

Deep understanding of distributed systems concepts: consensus protocols (Raft or Paxos), data replication, MVCC, transaction isolation levels, fault tolerance, and partition tolerance

Experience reading, debugging, and modifying complex codebases under correctness constraints (concurrency, durability, consistency)

Familiarity with LSM-tree storage engines (RocksDB, LevelDB, Pebble, SlateDB) or comparable storage internals

Familiarity with storage fundamentals: block devices, filesystems, SSD characteristics

Experience building and maintaining high-throughput, low-latency systems

Understanding of network fundamentals as they relate to distributed storage: bandwidth constraints, latency tradeoffs, cross-datacenter replication

Experience with infrastructure configuration tooling and infrastructure as code

Experience with monitoring tools (Prometheus, Grafana) and analytics tools (Clickhouse) for operating production database systems

Strong written and verbal communication skills and ability to explain technical decisions clearly

Comfortable operating in fast-paced environments with tight deadlines and evolving priorities

What Makes Cloudflare Special?

We’re not just a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company. We’re a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company with a soul. Fundamental to our mission to help build a better Internet is protecting the free and open Internet.

Project Galileo : Since 2014, we've equipped more than 2,400 journalism and civil society organizations in 111 countries with powerful tools to defend themselves against attacks that would otherwise censor their work, technology already used by Cloudflare’s enterprise customers--at no cost.

Athenian Project : In 2017, we created the Athenian Project to ensure that state and local governments have the highest level of protection and reliability for free, so that their constituents have access to...