Senior Software Engineer, Distributed Databases

About the Role

Cloudflare's Developer Platform powers stateful, data-intensive applications across our network. We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer to work across the database stack, from query planning and execution to transaction processing and durable storage. You'll make decisions that shape the consistency, durability, and latency guarantees that customer applications rely on. Correctness under concurrency and failure is central to the role.

Responsibilities

• Improve query planning and execution, including index selection, row reads and writes, and performance as data volumes and access patterns change.
• Build transaction and storage paths that make writes durable and reads consistent. Define when changes become visible, how commits survive failure, and how recovery restores a correct view of the data.
• Design deterministic simulations that make rare event orderings and failures reproducible.
• Plan stateful upgrades that cannot be reversed by rolling back software. Carry them through staged rollout, failover, and recovery without putting existing data at risk.
• Participate in the service's on-call rotation and incident response.
• Own major changes from design through production. Coordinate implementation across teams when a change spans multiple parts of the service, and help trace failures across those parts.
• Mentor other engineers through design reviews, debugging, and incident analysis involving concurrency, durability, and recovery.

Desirable Skills, Knowledge & Experience

• You have owned a database, storage engine, transaction system, or similarly correctness-sensitive stateful system from architecture through production. You can make architecture and implementation decisions when requirements or system boundaries are incomplete.
• You understand how query execution, indexing, transaction processing, and durable state shape what developers and operators observe.
• You understand how concurrency control, isolation, replication, and snapshots shape consistency, durability, and recovery. You can apply those concepts when operations arrive out of order, components fail independently, or the network partitions.
• You write and debug concurrent production software in Rust, Go, C++, or another systems language. You can trace failures across process, network, and durable-state boundaries.
• You have operated stateful systems through rollouts, scaling events, incidents, and recovery. You know the difference between transient unavailability and incomplete or incorrect recovery, and when a system is safe to return to service.
• You have led investigations where failures crossed systems owned by several teams.