Senior Distributed Systems Engineer

At Cloudflare, we're on a mission to help build a better Internet. The company runs one of the world's largest networks that powers millions of websites and other Internet properties. We're looking for a talented Distributed Systems Engineer to join the Data Localization team.

Role Summary

We are looking for a talented Distributed Systems Engineer to join the Data Localization team. The team builds the infrastructure that enforces where customer data is stored, processed, and decrypted across one of the largest globally distributed edge networks in the world.

You will work across the full stack in Go and Rust, from low-level policy enforcement and cryptographic key routing at the edge to customer-facing APIs and dashboards, on top of Cloudflare's existing infrastructure: the edge fleet, globally distributed key-value storage, Workers and Durable Objects, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, and regional ClickHouse. Features ship end-to-end: you will own the design, implementation, rollout, and production operation of the systems you build.

Role Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate backend services that enforce regional boundaries on where customer data is stored, processed, and decrypted, across a globally distributed edge network.
• Contribute to end-to-end feature delivery , write technical designs and RFCs, implement services and libraries, add tests and observability, drive rollout, and own the resulting systems in production.
• Partner with engineers on adjacent platforms, cryptography, networking, data, and product teams to integrate residency guarantees into new and existing surfaces without regressing performance or reliability for other customers.
• Reason carefully about failure modes, consistency, and blast radius; design systems that fail closed for compliance while degrading gracefully for availability, and make these tradeoffs explicit in design docs.
• Participate in on-call for your services, lead incident response and post-mortems, and continually invest in reliability, capacity planning, and cost.
• Raise the engineering bar through code review, mentorship, and clear written communication; contribute to the team's engineering standards and tooling.

Role Requirements (Must-Have Skills)

• 5+ years of professional experience designing, building, and operating production distributed systems at scale.
• Strong proficiency in at least one system or backend language such as Go, Rust, or C/C++, and a willingness to work in others as the codebase demands.
• Solid grasp of distributed systems fundamentals, including:
• Consistency and consensus models (strong, sequential, eventual; Paxos / Raft at a conceptual level).
• Replication, sharding, and partitioning strategies, and their tradeoffs against availability and latency.
• Failure modes: partial failure, network partitions, split brain, clock skew, and how these show up in real systems.
• Idempotency, retries, backpressure, timeouts, circuit breakers, and rate limiting as first-class design concerns.
• Health checking, failure detection, leader election, and graceful degradation.
• Observability: metrics, logs, and tracing as design inputs, not afterthoughts.
• Practical experience with API design (REST or gRPC), relational databases, and asynchronous messaging or event streaming systems, with a clear understanding of transactional and consistency boundaries.
• Comfortable with AI-assisted development tooling, with the judgment to use it to accelerate work while remaining accountable for correctness, security, and design quality.
• Track record of production ownership: on-call, incident response, post-mortems, and continuous investment in reliability and performance.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills; ability to write clear design documents and collaborate effectively across time zones.

Nice-to-Have Skills

• Experience building compliance-driven, security-sensitive, or multi-region systems.
• Familiarity with cryptography basics , envelope encryption, key management, HSMs, or PKI.
• Exposure to edge, CDN, or L4/L7 proxy platforms, or to large-scale globally distributed storage or key-value systems.
• Experience contributing to or driving multi-team, multi-quarter engineering programs with cross-functional dependencies across platform, security, and product teams.