Senior Systems Engineer

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: Bengaluru, India About the role 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. What you'll do 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. Responsibilities (Must-Have Skills) 8+ 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. 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 i