Senior Distributed Systems Engineer

Available Locations:Austin, 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,

Role Summary

We are looking for a talented Distributed Systems Engineer to join the Data Localization team. The team builds the infrastructure that enforces where customer data is stored, processed, and decrypted across one of the largest globally distributed edge networks in the world. The problem is not simply building fast, resilient distributed systems; it is building them with provable geographic boundaries that hold under failure, at the scale and reliability Cloudflare's customers depend on.

You will work across the full stack in Go and Rust, from low-level policy enforcement and cryptographic key routing at the edge to customer-facing APIs and dashboards, on top of Cloudflare's existing infrastructure: the edge fleet, globally distributed key-value storage, Workers and Durable Objects, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, and regional ClickHouse. Features ship end-to-end: you will own the design, implementation, rollout, and production operation of the systems you build.

This is a good fit if you are drawn to problems where compliance correctness is a hard constraint and not just a quality goal, and where the failure modes you reason about have real consequences for customers operating under regulatory scrutiny.

Role Responsibilities

• 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.

Role Requirements (Must-Have Skills)

• 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.

Nice-to-Have Skills

• Experience building compliance-driven, security-sensitive, or multi-region systems.
• Familiarity with cryptography basics — envelope encryption, key management, HSMs, or PKI.
• Exposure to edge, CDN, or L4/L7 proxy platforms, or to large-scale globally distributed storage or key-value systems.
• Experience contributing to or driving multi-team, multi-quarter engineering programs with cross-functional dependencies across platform, security, and product teams.

Compensation
Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.

Equity
This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan.

Benefits
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.

Health & Welfare Benefits

• 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

Financial Benefits

• Short and Long Term Disability Insurance
• Life & Accident Insurance
• 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan
• Employee Stock Participation Plan

Time Off

• Flexible paid time off covering vacation and sick leave
• Leave programs, including parental, pregnancy health, medical, and bereavement leave