Senior Software Engineer, Distributed Databases

Available Locations | Austin, TX; Seattle, WA or London, UK

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, support caregiving, build capital for the future and make life a little easier and fun! The below is a description of our benefits for employees in the United States, and benefits may vary for employees based outside the U.S.

Health & Welfare Benefits

• Medical/Rx Insurance
• Dental Insurance
• Vision Insurance
• Flexible Spending Accounts
• Commuter Spending Accounts
• Fertility & Family Forming Benefits
• On-demand mental health support and Employee Assistance Program
• Global Travel Medical Insurance

Financial Benefits

• Short and Long Term Disability Insurance
• Life & Accident Insurance
• 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan
• Employee Stock Participation Plan

Time Off

• Flexible paid time off covering vacation and sick leave
• Leave programs, including parental, pregnancy health, medical, and bereavement leave