Senior Distributed Systems Engineer, Cloudflare

• 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
• 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

Desirable

• 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
• 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