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Senior Distributed Systems Engineer - Cache

Cloudflare· Engineering
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Hybrid (Multiple US locations including Atlanta, GA; Austin, TX; Champaign, IL; New York, NY; San Francisco, CA; Seattle, WA; Washington, DC)$194k - $266kfull-timePosted 1mo ago

About the role

Senior role focused on designing, building, and operating the high-performance cache and proxy data plane at Cloudflare’s edge, with emphasis on latency, correctness, and reliability across globally distributed systems built on Pingora (Rust). Hybrid work location options across multiple U.S. cities.

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
  • Reason carefully about failure modes and blast radius, using traffic cohorts, measurable guardrails, and rollback mechanisms to introduce high-impact changes safely
  • Partner with product and engineering teams across Cloudflare that depend on or extend the cache and proxy platform
  • Raise the engineering bar through code review, mentorship, clear written communication, and improvements to team standards and tooling

Qualifications

  • 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++, with a willingness to work in Rust
  • 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

Skills

Required:Production software design and ownershipRustHTTP semantics and transport protocolsLinux systems and performance analysisMonitoring, debugging, on-call, incident responseCommunication and collaboration

Benefits

  • Equity plan eligibility
Last updated Oct 14, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Cloudflare

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