Back to jobs
New

Senior Distributed Systems Engineer - Cache

Hybrid

About Us

At Cloudflare, we are on a mission to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world’s 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 Magazine’s Top Company Cultures list and ranked among the World’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company.

At Cloudflare, we’re not looking for people who wait for a polished roadmap; we’re 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 you’re 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, you’ll fit right in.

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

About the Department

Cloudflare's 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 world's largest CDNs.

Role Summary

The Cache team builds and operates the high-performance reverse proxy and caching data plane at Cloudflare's edge. Built on Pingora, Cloudflare's 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 Cloudflare's 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.

Role Responsibilities

  • Design, build, and operate the high-performance cache and proxy data plane that serves content at Cloudflare's 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 team's 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

Role Requirements (Must-Have Skills)

  • 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

Nice-to-Have Skills

  • 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 $194,000 - $266,000.

Seattle, Washington D.C., New York Estimated Base salary $185,000 - $254,000.

Denver, Austin, Illinois, Atlanta Estimated Base salary $168,000 - $231,000.

Equity

This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan.

What Makes Cloudflare Special?

We’re not just a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company. We’re 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, we've equipped more than 2,400 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 Cloudflare’s 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, we've 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. Here’s the deal - we don’t 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 you’d like to be a part of? We’d 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 person's, 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.

Cloudflare provides reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities.  Please tell us if you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job. Examples of reasonable accommodations include, but are not limited to, changing the application process, providing documents in an alternate format, using a sign language interpreter, or using specialized equipment.  If you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job, please contact us via e-mail at hr@cloudflare.com or via mail at 101 Townsend St. San Francisco, CA 94107.

Apply for this job

*

indicates a required field

Resume/CV*

Accepted file types: pdf, doc, docx, txt, rtf

Cover Letter

Accepted file types: pdf, doc, docx, txt, rtf

Select...
Please review and acknowledge Cloudflare's Candidate Privacy Policy (cloudflare.com/candidate-privacy-notice/). *
Select...

Voluntary Self-Identification

For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey. Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiring process or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential file.

As set forth in Cloudflare’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

Select...
Select...
Race & Ethnicity Definitions

If you believe you belong to any of the categories of protected veterans listed below, please indicate by making the appropriate selection. As a government contractor subject to the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA), we request this information in order to measure the effectiveness of the outreach and positive recruitment efforts we undertake pursuant to VEVRAA. Classification of protected categories is as follows:

A "disabled veteran" is one of the following: a veteran of the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service who is entitled to compensation (or who but for the receipt of military retired pay would be entitled to compensation) under laws administered by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs; or a person who was discharged or released from active duty because of a service-connected disability.

A "recently separated veteran" means any veteran during the three-year period beginning on the date of such veteran's discharge or release from active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval, or air service.

An "active duty wartime or campaign badge veteran" means a veteran who served on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service during a war, or in a campaign or expedition for which a campaign badge has been authorized under the laws administered by the Department of Defense.

An "Armed forces service medal veteran" means a veteran who, while serving on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service, participated in a United States military operation for which an Armed Forces service medal was awarded pursuant to Executive Order 12985.

Select...

Voluntary Self-Identification of Disability

Form CC-305
Page 1 of 1
OMB Control Number 1250-0005
Expires 07/31/2029

Why are you being asked to complete this form?

We are a federal contractor or subcontractor. The law requires us to provide equal employment opportunity to qualified people with disabilities. We have a goal of having at least 7% of our workers as people with disabilities. The law says we must measure our progress towards this goal. To do this, we must ask applicants and employees if they have a disability or have ever had one. People can become disabled, so we need to ask this question at least every five years.

Completing this form is voluntary, and we hope that you will choose to do so. Your answer is confidential. No one who makes hiring decisions will see it. Your decision to complete the form and your answer will not harm you in any way. If you want to learn more about the law or this form, visit the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) website at www.dol.gov/ofccp.

How do you know if you have a disability?

A disability is a condition that substantially limits one or more of your “major life activities.” If you have or have ever had such a condition, you are a person with a disability. Disabilities include, but are not limited to:

  • Alcohol or other substance use disorder (not currently using drugs illegally)
  • Autoimmune disorder, for example, lupus, fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, HIV/AIDS
  • Blind or low vision
  • Cancer (past or present)
  • Cardiovascular or heart disease
  • Celiac disease
  • Cerebral palsy
  • Deaf or serious difficulty hearing
  • Diabetes
  • Disfigurement, for example, disfigurement caused by burns, wounds, accidents, or congenital disorders
  • Epilepsy or other seizure disorder
  • Gastrointestinal disorders, for example, Crohn's Disease, irritable bowel syndrome
  • Intellectual or developmental disability
  • Mental health conditions, for example, depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorder, schizophrenia, PTSD
  • Missing limbs or partially missing limbs
  • Mobility impairment, benefiting from the use of a wheelchair, scooter, walker, leg brace(s) and/or other supports
  • Nervous system condition, for example, migraine headaches, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis (MS)
  • Neurodivergence, for example, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorder, dyslexia, dyspraxia, other learning disabilities
  • Partial or complete paralysis (any cause)
  • Pulmonary or respiratory conditions, for example, tuberculosis, asthma, emphysema
  • Short stature (dwarfism)
  • Traumatic brain injury
Select...

PUBLIC BURDEN STATEMENT: According to the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 no persons are required to respond to a collection of information unless such collection displays a valid OMB control number. This survey should take about 5 minutes to complete.