Senior Systems Engineer, Pipelines

About this role

<div class="content-intro"><div><strong>About Us</strong></div> <div> <p>At Cloudflare, we are on a mission to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world’s largest networks that powers millions of websites and other Internet properties for customers ranging from individual bloggers to SMBs to Fortune 500 companies. Cloudflare protects and accelerates any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. Internet properties powered by Cloudflare all have web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with every request. As a result, they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. Cloudflare was named to Entrepreneur Magazine’s Top Company Cultures list and ranked among the World’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company. </p> <p>At Cloudflare, we’re not looking for people who wait for a polished roadmap; we’re looking for the builders who see the cracks in the Internet that everyone else has simply learned to live with. We value candidates who have the instinct to spot a "normalized" problem and the AI-native curiosity to create a solution using the latest tools. Our culture is built on iteration, leveraging AI to ship faster today to make it better tomorrow, while ensuring that every improvement, no matter how small, is shared across the team to lift everyone up. If you’re the type of person who values curiosity over bureaucracy, and that AI is a partner in solving tough problems to keep the Internet moving forward, you’ll fit right in.</p> </div></div><h3><strong>Available Locations: Austin, TX </strong></h3> <h3><strong>About the Department</strong></h3> <p>Emerging Technologies & Incubation (ETI) is where new and bold products are built and released within Cloudflare. Rather than being constrained by the structures which make Cloudflare a massively successful business, we are able to leverage them to deliver entirely new tools and products to our customers. Cloudflare’s edge and network make it possible to solve problems at massive scale and efficiency which would be impossible for almost any other organization. </p> <h3><strong>Is this role a fit for you?</strong></h3> <p>We are looking for engineers who build infrastructure software from scratch, not those who operate it. If your core expertise is configuring, man<span class="citation-1">aging, scaling, or writing applications on top of existing data platforms like </span><span class="citation-1">Kafka, Flink, Spark, Databricks, or Snowflake</span><span class="citation-1">, this role is not the right fit. We are seeking the engineers who can </span><span class="citation-1 citation-end-1">write the code that replaces t</span>hese tools.</p> <h3><strong>What you'll do</strong></h3> <p>As a Senior Systems Engineer focused on Cloudflare's core storage and streaming products, you will design and implement the foundational layers of our next-generation data services. We work backward from developer needs, reimagining solutions by leveraging our unique global network.</p> <p>You will own your code from inception to release, delivering solutions at all layers of the software stack to empower Cloudflare customers. On any given day, you might be architecting a new globally distributed data consistency model, optimizing storage engine performance, or designing a novel API for a new data-centric product. You can expect to interact with a variety of languages and technologies including, but not limited to JavaScript, Typescript, Rust, and C++.</p> <h3>Requirements</h3> <ul> <li>Minimum 6+ years of experience designing, building, and deploying the internals of large-scale distributed systems or storage engines from scratch.</li> <li>Direct experience writing core components of a storage or streaming system.</li> <li>Proven track record of debugging, profiling, and fixing complex race conditions, split-brain scenarios, and network partition failures at the infrastructure layer.</li> <li>Deep, expert-level proficiency in Rust or C++ applied to systems programming.</li> </ul> <h3><strong>Bonus Points</strong></h3> <ul> <li data-path-to-node="19,0,0">Experience building time-series databases, log-structured merge-trees, or real-time stream processing engines from the ground up.</li> <li data-path-to-node="19,1,0">Academic or professional contributions to distributed systems research (e.g., consensus, conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs), or database theory).</li> </ul><div class="content-conclusion"><p><strong>What Makes Cloudflare Special?</strong></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We’re not just a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company. We’re a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company with a soul. Fundamental to our mission to help build a better Internet is protecting the free and open Internet.</span></p> <p><a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/protecting-free-expression-online/"><strong>Project Galileo</strong></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">: Since 2014, we've equipped more than 2,400 journalism and civil society organizations in 111 countries with powerful tools to defend themselves against attacks that would otherwise censor their work, technology already used by Cloudflare’s enterprise customers--at no…