Senior Software Engineer, R2 Metadata

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

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.

R2 is Cloudflare's object storage platform, offering developers durable, reliable storage that integrates seamlessly with Cloudflare's global network and Developer Platform. The R2 Metadata team owns the metadata layer that underpins every R2 operation, every object put, get, list, and delete flows through the systems we build and operate.

R2 is growing rapidly, and the metadata layer must evolve to keep pace. The team is responsible for designing and operating the metadata systems that track every object in R2, building and shipping developer-facing features, and ensuring the reliability and performance of these systems at global scale.

You'll be joining a team that operates at the intersection of distributed databases, large scale storage infrastructure, and edge computing; building systems that need to be correct, fast, and reliable.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement features in a metadata system, backed by a distributed SQL DB, that serves every R2 API operation, ensuring correctness, performance, and compatibility with the S3 API surface.
• Build and operate production services on Cloudflare Workers and Kubernetes that handle high throughput metadata operations with strong consistency and durability guarantees.
• Own the schema, data model, and query patterns for a metadata layer managing billions of objects across multiple distributed database clusters.
• Own projects end to end; from design docs and schema changes through implementation, testing, deployment, and production monitoring.
• Participate in oncall rotations, drive incident resolution, and write postmortems that improve reliability.
• Use AI tools extensively to accelerate development, debugging, and operational tasks. We expect engineers to leverage AI as a core part of their workflow.
• Collaborate across teams (storage infrastructure, networking, other platform teams) to coordinate capacity planning, API contracts, and cross cutting initiatives.

Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience

• Strong programming skills in TypeScript, Go, or similar languages.
• Experience with distributed databases; schema design, query optimization, indexing strategies, and understanding consistency/performance tradeoffs at scale.
• Experience building or operating large scale distributed systems with strong reliability requirements.
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure concepts such as object storage, edge computing, or service oriented architectures.
• Understanding of reliability and observability practices: monitoring, alerting, performance tuning, and incident response.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills; ability to explain technical decisions clearly and coordinate across teams.
• Comfortable working with AI coding tools as part of a daily development workflow.
• Experience with Cloudflare Workers, Durable Objects, or edge computing platforms is a strong plus.

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