Senior Software Engineer, Durable Objects (DO)

Available Locations: Austin, TX | New York, NY | San Francisco, CA

About the Role

Cloudflare’s Emerging Technologies & Incubation team builds and launches bold new products on Cloudflare’s edge network. This role is on the Durable Objects team, which powers stateful serverless applications for Cloudflare customers. You’ll help evolve the runtime and the low-level routing and storage systems that support real-time chat, multiplayer games, AI agents, and other stateful workloads at scale.

Responsibilities

• Build and improve the Durable Objects runtime.
• Design and develop the low-level routing and storage systems that power customer applications.
• Improve reliability, scalability, performance, and feature depth.
• Own code end-to-end from design through production.
• Solve complex problems in production distributed systems.
• Work across JavaScript, TypeScript, Rust, and C++.
• Help drive the continued evolution of the system.

Desirable Skills, Knowledge & Experience

• 5+ years of experience writing systems software.
• Operational mindset with experience owning code in production.
• Strong foundation in data structures, algorithms, and system design.
• Deep expertise in at least one systems programming language such as C/C++ or Rust.
• Experience designing and architecting large-scale distributed systems.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms, especially serverless architectures.
• Experience as a technical leader or team lead, driving engineering decisions.

Bonus Points

• Experience working on database internals, especially SQLite.
• Deep understanding of web technologies such as browsers, HTTP, JavaScript, and WebAssembly.
• Background in low-latency, real-time environments such as game streaming, high-frequency trading, or payment systems.
• Experience debugging, optimizing, and identifying failure modes in large-scale Linux-based distributed systems.

Compensation

Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.

• For Bay Area based hires: Estimated annual salary of $194,000 - $266,000
• 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