Senior Distributed Systems Engineer Cache

At Cloudflare we are on a mission to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the worlds largest networks that powers millions of websites and other Internet properties for customers ranging from individual bloggers to SMBs to Fortune 500 companies. Cloudflare protects and accelerates any Internet application online without adding hardware installing software or changing a line of code. Internet properties powered by Cloudflare all have web traffic routed through its intelligent global network which gets smarter with every request. As a result they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. Cloudflare was named to Entrepreneur Magazines Top Company Cultures list and ranked among the Worlds Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company.

At Cloudflare were not looking for people who wait for a polished roadmap; were looking for the builders who see the cracks in the Internet that everyone else has simply learned to live with. We value candidates who have the instinct to spot a normalized problem and the AI-native curiosity to create a solution using the latest tools. Our culture is built on iteration leveraging AI to ship faster today to make it better tomorrow while ensuring that every improvement no matter how small is shared across the team to lift everyone up. If youre the type of person who values curiosity over bureaucracy and that AI is a partner in solving tough problems to keep the Internet moving forward youll fit right in.

Available Locations: Atlanta GA Austin TX Champaign IL Denver CO New York NY San Francisco CA Seattle WA Washington DC

Cloudflares Engineering Team builds and runs the software that helps power millions of Internet properties. Product development covers both new features and functionality as well as scaling our existing software to meet the challenges of a massively growing customer base.

The Content Delivery group helps make the Internet faster safer and more reliable by building and optimizing one of the worlds largest CDNs.

The Cache team builds and operates the high-performance reverse proxy and caching data plane at Cloudflares edge. Built on Pingora Cloudflares open-source Rust framework for fast reliable network services this software serves cached content routes traffic across cache tiers and connects Cloudflare to customer origins. Its performance correctness and resilience directly affect request latency origin load and availability across Cloudflares global network.

You will work primarily on the reverse proxy and the services that support it: backend routing and load balancing cache storage and indexing globally distributed purge Tiered Cache routing and production observability. These systems are also foundational building blocks for teams across Cloudflare which use the proxy caching routing and purge capabilities to power their own products. The team carries these capabilities through shared internal interfaces distributed control planes and customer-facing products including Cache Rules Tiered Cache Cache Reserve Workers Cache API and Always Online. Features ship end to end: you will help design implement test roll out and operate the systems you build.

This is a good fit if you enjoy problems where latency correctness and reliability are hard requirements; where changes must be introduced safely across a global fleet; and where improvements can benefit a significant portion of Internet traffic.

• Design build and operate the high-performance cache and proxy data plane that serves content at Cloudflares edge and connects to customer origins
• Contribute to Pingora and the production services built on it improving asynchronous I/O connection handling memory and disk efficiency and tail latency
• Improve cache correctness and performance through object placement retention admission and eviction policies range-request handling and resilience to corrupt or incomplete data
• Build globally distributed purge and Tiered Cache systems that invalidate content quickly select efficient cache paths improve hit rates and reduce origin load
• Deliver shared platform capabilities and customer-facing APIs and rules for cache keys TTLs response handling purge behavior and programmatic access from Workers
• Own features end to end: write technical designs implement services and libraries add automated tests and observability drive staged rollouts and operate the resulting systems in production
• Participate in the teams on-call rotation lead incident response and post-mortems and continually improve reliability capacity and operational tooling
• Reason carefully about failure modes and blast radius using traffic cohorts measurable guardrails and rollback mechanisms to introduce high-impact changes safely
• Partner with product and engineering teams across Cloudflare that depend on or extend the cache and proxy platform
• Raise the engineering bar through code review mentorship clear written communication and improvements to team standards and tooling

• Minimum 4 years of professional experience designing building and operating production software systems
• Strong proficiency in at least one systems or backend language such as Rust Go C or C with a willingness to work in Rust
• Strong understanding of HTTP semantics and transport protocols such as TCP TLS and QUIC
• Experience designing and implementing secure resilient high-performance distributed systems
• Experience with Linux systems networking concurrency and performance analysis
• Track record of production ownership including monitoring debugging on-call incident response and ongoing reliability improvements
• Experience using metrics logs traces profiling and experiments to understand production behavior and validate improvements
• Strong written and verbal communication skills including the ability to write clear technical designs and lead projects across team boundaries
• Willingness to use AI-assisted engineering tools to accelerate development and investigation while remaining accountable for correctness security and design quality

• Professional experience with Rust or high-performance asynchronous systems
• Experience with caches HTTP proxies CDNs distributed storage or latency-sensitive data-plane services
• Experience analyzing memory use disk I/O resource contention and tail latency in production systems
• Experience building APIs or distributed control planes using event streaming relational databases or analytical data systems
• Familiarity with Kubernetes Kafka PostgreSQL ClickHouse or similar infrastructure
• Experience contributing to open-source software or leading multi-team engineering programs

Compensation

Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location and level.

San Francisco Estimated Base salary $194000 - $266000.

Seattle Washington D.C. New York Estimated Base salary $185000 - $254000.

Denver Austin Illinois Atlanta Estimated Base salary $168000 - $231000.

Equity

This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflares equity plan.

Were not just a highly ambitious large-scale technology company. Were a highly ambitious large-scale technology company with a soul. Fundamental to our mission to help build a better Internet is protecting the free and open Internet.

Project Galileo: Since 2014 weve equipped more than 2400 journalism and civil society organizations in 111 countries with powerful tools to defend themselves against attacks that would otherwise censor their work technology already used by Cloudflares enterprise customers--at no cost.

Athenian Project: In 2017 we created the Athenian Project to ensure that state and local governments have the highest level of protection and reliability for free so that their constituents have access to election information and voter registration. Since the project weve provided services to more than 425 local government election websites in 33 states.

1.1.1.1: We released 1.1.1.1 to help fix the foundation of the Internet by building a faster more secure and privacy-centric public DNS resolver. This is available publicly for everyone to use - it is the first consumer-focused service Cloudflare has ever released. Heres the deal - we dont store client IP addresses never ever. We will continue to abide by our privacy commitment and ensure that no user data is sold to advertisers or used to target consumers.

Sound like something youd like to be a part of Wed love to hear from you!

Please note that applicants who progress to the offer stage of the interview process may be asked to attend an in-person interview within one of the Cloudflare Offices or Cloudflare Hubs. More details about this will be available at that stage of the interview process.

This position may require access to information protected under U.S. export control laws including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations. Please note that any offer of employment may be conditioned on your authorization to receive software or technology controlled under these U.S. export laws without sponsorship for an export license.

Cloudflare is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunity for all people and place great value in both diversity and inclusiveness. All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to their or any other persons perceived or actual race color religion sex gender gender identity gender expression sexual orientation national origin ancestry citizenship age physical or mental disability medical condition family care status or any other basis protected by law. We are an AA/Veterans/Disabled Employer.

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