Senior Software Engineer - Quicksilver - Distributed Key Value

Available Locations

• Atlanta, US
• Austin, US
• Denver, US
• New York, US
• Seattle, US
• Washington DC, US
• Amsterdam, Netherlands
• London, UK

Applications will be accepted until November 19, 2026.

About the role

Quicksilver is Cloudflare’s globally distributed key-value store. It replicates our data all around the world, over tens of thousands of servers and over 500 data centers. It handles all kinds of network conditions and serves billions of keys per second. In this role, you can expect to see challenges like unexpected network issues, hardware failures, kernel bugs and still have to deliver the data to the edge in a fast and reliable way. Along with the rest of the team, you will own and support the whole stack: the code base, the unit and integration test, deployment and rollback plans, operations, monitoring, alerting, debugging and on-call. Quicksilver is written in Go and C. If working at this scale excites you and you are intrigued by very tricky bugs, rather than being scared by them, you might be a match for this role.

This role may require flexibility to be on-call outside of standard working hours to address technical issues as needed.

What you'll do

• Work on our distributed large scale key-value store, you will write new features in Go and reviewing pull request
• Improve performance, CPU, memory usage, etc.
• Improve our monitoring and our tools, all written in Go
• Help with debugging and investigating hard to reproduce problems

Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience:

• You have previous experience writing robust systems, code quality, performance and technical debt. You understand the tradeoffs that doing rigorous engineering requires.
• You have proven experience with storage systems, peer to peer systems, large scale distributed systems or simply system programming in general.
• You have previous experience of chasing problems through multiple layers of our software stack. You can be flexible and you are very curious.
• You are flexible and very autonomous. You won’t be micromanaged in this role and will be looked to have experience thinking out of the box and coming up with simple and smart designs for complex issues.
• You have a previous track record of being pragmatic and believe in the value of simple solutions.
• You equally enjoy low-level and high-level programming. You have a taste for programming languages.
• You enjoy being a part of a team that challenges each other's designs -- you are good at taking and giving constructive criticism with a goal of producing the best solution.
• You are not afraid of engaging in outages on anti-social hours.

Compensation

Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.

• For Colorado based hires: Estimated annual salary of $168,000 - $231,000
• For New York City based hires: Estimated annual salary of $185,000 - $254,000
• For Washington based hires: Estimated annual salary of $185,000 - $254,000
• For Washington DC 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