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Senior Distributed Systems Engineer

Cloudflare· Engineering
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AustinFull-timePosted 3mo ago

About the role

Talented distributed systems engineer to join Cloudflare's Data Localization team, building infrastructure to enforce regional data storage, processing, and decryption boundaries across a globally distributed edge network. Role spans Go and Rust across low-level policy enforcement to customer-facing APIs, with production ownership and emphasis on compliance, reliability, and performance.

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 surfaces without regressing performance or reliability.
  • Reason carefully about failure modes, consistency, and blast radius; design systems that fail closed for compliance while degrading gracefully for availability, and document these tradeoffs.
  • Participate in on-call for services, lead incident response and post-mortems, and invest in reliability, capacity planning, and cost.
  • Raise the engineering bar through code review, mentorship, and clear written communication; contribute to engineering standards and tooling.

Qualifications

  • 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++, with willingness to work in others as needed.
  • Solid grasp of distributed systems fundamentals: consistency models, replication/sharding, failure modes, idempotency, retries, backpressure, timeouts, circuit breakers, rate limiting, health checks, observability.
  • Practical experience with API design (REST or gRPC), relational databases, and asynchronous messaging or event streaming systems, with understanding of transactional and consistency boundaries.
  • Comfortable with AI-assisted development tooling and maintaining accountability for correctness, security, and design quality.
  • Track record of production ownership: on-call, incident response, post-mortems, reliability and performance improvements.
  • Strong written and verbal communication skills; ability to write clear design documents and collaborate across time zones.

Skills

Required:GoRustDistributed systems fundamentalsAPI design (REST/gRPC)
Nice to have:C/C++

Benefits

  • Health & Welfare Benefits: Medical/Rx, Dental, Vision, Flexible Spending Accounts, Commuter Spending Accounts, Fertility & Family Forming Benefits, Mental health support, Global Travel Medical Insurance
Last updated Aug 26, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

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