Software Engineer, R2 Gateway

Available Locations: Austin, TX or London, UK (Hybrid)

About the Role

R2 is Cloudflare's object storage platform, offering developers durable, reliable storage with zero egress fees that integrates seamlessly with Cloudflare's global network and Developer Platform. The R2 Gateway team owns the request-facing layer of R2 — the S3-compatible API gateway that every object put, get, list, and delete flows through. When a customer or application talks to R2, they talk to the systems we build and operate.

R2 is growing rapidly, and the gateway must evolve to keep pace. The team is responsible for the API surface that handles authentication, request routing, rate limiting, and coordination between clients and R2's storage and metadata layers — all while maintaining strict compatibility with the S3 API and delivering low-latency, highly available access at global scale.

You'll be joining a team that operates at the intersection of large-scale distributed systems, storage infrastructure, and edge computing — building request-path systems that need to be correct, fast, and reliable on every single call.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and operate the S3-compatible API gateway that serves every R2 operation, ensuring correctness, low latency, and compatibility with the S3 API surface.
• Build and operate production services on Cloudflare Workers and Kubernetes that handle high-throughput request traffic with strong availability and durability guarantees.
• Own the request path end to end — authentication, authorization, routing, rate limiting, and error handling — and the interfaces between the gateway and R2's storage and metadata layers.
• Own projects end to end: from design docs through implementation, testing, deployment, and production monitoring.
• Continuously improve the reliability, performance, and observability of the gateway; ramp quickly into unfamiliar and legacy code paths and reduce operational toil.
• Participate in on-call rotations, drive incident resolution, and write postmortems that raise reliability standards.
• 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, metadata, networking, other platform teams) to coordinate API contracts, capacity planning, and cross-cutting initiatives.

Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience

• Strong programming skills in Rust, TypeScript, Go, or similar languages.
• 3-4 years of experience building or operating large-scale distributed systems on the request path, with strong latency and reliability requirements.
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure concepts such as object storage, HTTP/API gateways, edge computing, or service-oriented architectures.
• Experience designing and operating high-throughput APIs — authentication, routing, rate limiting, and backward-compatible API evolution.
• 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 the S3 API surface, or with Cloudflare Workers, Durable Objects, or edge computing platforms, is a strong plus.