Senior Systems Engineer, Cloudflare

• You should be excited by the current pace of the AI ecosystem
• You should be comfortable using AI-native tools, agents, harnesses, and automation to improve your own engineering loop — and interested in building the internal tools and context that help a small team ship like a much larger one
• 5+ years of experience building and operating production systems, ideally in AI infrastructure, developer platforms, cloud infrastructure, edge/proxy systems, high-scale APIs, or distributed systems
• Strong systems engineering fundamentals: networking, APIs, reliability, observability, data modeling, performance, and operational tradeoffs
• Experience designing or scaling distributed systems where latency, throughput, availability, and correctness all matter
• Ability to work comfortably across the stack, from API design and product surfaces to backend services, queues, storage systems, control planes, or performance-critical code
• Strong developer tools taste. You have used and built enough APIs, SDKs, dashboards, CLIs, docs, and internal platforms to know what makes them delightful or painful
• Clear technical communication: you can write design docs, explain tradeoffs, review architecture, and align engineers and product partners around a practical path forward
• A builder’s bias toward working software. You can prototype quickly, ship incrementally, and improve systems while they are already in production
• Operational judgment. You understand that at Cloudflare scale, rare bugs are not rare for long, and you build systems that are observable, resilient, and recoverable
• Comfort using AI-native development workflows and curiosity about how agents, tools, and automation can improve engineering productivity

Desirable

• AI inference is becoming core infrastructure
• Every serious application will need access to many models, across many providers, with reliability, observability, security, cost control, and routing built in from the start
• AI Gateway is Cloudflare’s bet that this layer should exist at the network edge: close to users, close to compute, and simple enough that a developer can adopt it with one API change
• We are looking for a Senior Systems Engineer to help build that layer
• This is a deeply hands-on individual contributor role for someone who can move from a half-formed product idea to a working, production-ready system quickly
• You will work across the stack — from distributed systems and high-throughput APIs to developer-facing workflows, dashboards, SDKs, and docs — helping define how developers build and operate AI applications on Cloudflare
• Provider APIs change weekly, new models appear constantly, and developer expectations are rising just as quickly
• AI Gateway needs engineers who can build durable infrastructure in that environment without slowing down
• We also believe AI should change how we build software, not just what we build
• We dogfood AI Gateway, Workers AI, and Cloudflare’s broader agent stack heavily
• Build core AI Gateway systems that handle high-volume inference traffic across providers, models, and Cloudflare’s global network
• Design and implement APIs, routing primitives, observability features, controls, and developer workflows that make AI Gateway reliable and easy to adopt
• Work across product and infrastructure boundaries with Workers AI, Agents, and the broader Developer Platform organization to make Cloudflare’s AI platform feel like one coherent product
• Turn ambiguous product and technical ideas into prototypes, design docs, shipped features, and measurable production improvements
• Improve reliability, performance, cost efficiency, and debuggability for latency-sensitive AI workloads
• Build the software — and the software that builds the software: agents, tests, harnesses, evaluation loops, operational tools, and internal context that help the team move faster with confidence
• Sweat the developer experience. Error messages, SDKs, dashboard flows, docs, examples, and API details all matter
• Mentor other engineers through design review, code review, debugging, and technical leadership without needing people-management authority
• Bring strong opinions, clear judgment, and a willingness to revise your view when data, users, or production reality prove otherwis