Senior Software Engineer, Distributed Databases

Role details

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. Available Locations | Austin, TX or Seattle, WA About the Role 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. 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. Responsibilities 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. 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 Compensation Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location. For New York City, New Jersey, Washington, Washington DC, and California (excluding Bay Area) based hires: Estimated annual salary of $185,000 - $254,000 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, s