Senior Distributed Systems Engineer - Cache

About the Role

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

Key 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

Requirements

• 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++
• 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.