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Senior Systems Engineer, AI Gateway

Cloudflare· Emerging Technology and Incubation
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Austin, TX or San Francisco, CA$194k - $266kfull-timePosted 2mo ago

About the role

Senior Systems Engineer role at Cloudflare focused on building and operating the AI Gateway infrastructure at the network edge, delivering high-volume AI inference, durable APIs and developer workflows, and cross-team collaboration across Workers AI, Agents, and the Developer Platform to enable AI applications.

Responsibilities

  • Build core AI Gateway systems that handle high-volume inference traffic across providers, models, and Cloudflare’s global network.
  • Design and implement APIs, routing primitives, observability features, controls, and developer workflows that make AI Gateway reliable and easy to adopt.
  • Work across product and infrastructure boundaries with Workers AI, Agents, and the broader Developer Platform organization to make Cloudflare’s AI platform feel like one coherent product.
  • Turn ambiguous product and technical ideas into prototypes, design docs, shipped features, and measurable production improvements.
  • Improve reliability, performance, cost efficiency, and debuggability for latency-sensitive AI workloads.
  • Build the software — and the software that builds the software: agents, tests, harnesses, evaluation loops, operational tools, and internal context that help the team move faster with confidence.
  • Sweat the developer experience. Error messages, SDKs, dashboard flows, docs, examples, and API details all matter.
  • Mentor other engineers through design review, code review, debugging, and technical leadership without needing people-management authority.
  • Bring strong opinions, clear judgment, and a willingness to revise your view when data, users, or production reality prove otherwise.

Qualifications

  • 5+ years of experience building and operating production systems, ideally in AI infrastructure, developer platforms, cloud infrastructure, edge/proxy systems, high-scale APIs, or distributed systems.
  • Strong systems engineering fundamentals: networking, APIs, reliability, observability, data modeling, performance, and operational tradeoffs.
  • Experience designing or scaling distributed systems where latency, throughput, availability, and correctness all matter.
  • Ability to work comfortably across the stack, from API design and product surfaces to backend services, queues, storage systems, control planes, or performance-critical code.
  • Strong developer tools taste. You have used and built enough APIs, SDKs, dashboards, CLIs, docs, and internal platforms to know what makes them delightful or painful.
  • Clear technical communication: you can write design docs, explain tradeoffs, review architecture, and align engineers and product partners around a practical path forward.
  • A builder’s bias toward working software. You can prototype quickly, ship incrementally, and improve systems while they are already in production.
  • Operational judgment. You understand that at Cloudflare scale, rare bugs are not rare for long, and you build systems that are observable, resilient, and recoverable.
  • Comfort using AI-native development workflows and curiosity about how agents, tools, and automation can improve engineering productivity.

Skills

Required:Production systems engineeringDistributed systems designAPI design and developer experienceCross-functional collaboration

Benefits

  • Health & Welfare Benefits including Medical/Rx, Dental, Vision, FSA, Commuter Benefits, Fertility & Family Forming Benefits, mental health support, global travel medical insurance.
  • Financial Benefits including Short and Long Term Disability, Life & Accident Insurance, 401(k), Employee Stock Participation Plan.
  • Time Off including Flexible PTO and various leave programs (parental, pregnancy health, medical, bereavement).
Last updated Sep 30, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Cloudflare

Connect, protect, and build everywhere | Cloudflare

Make employees, applications and networks faster and more secure everywhere, while reducing complexity and cost.

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