Senior Systems Engineer, AI Gateway

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 San Francisco, CA About the Role 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. You should be excited by the current pace of the AI ecosystem. 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. 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. Responsibilities 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 otherwise. Desirable Skills, Knowledge & Experience 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. Bonus Points Experience building AI/ML infrastructure, inference platforms,