Senior Distributed Systems Engineer - Cache

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate the high-performance cache and proxy data plane serving content at Cloudflare’s edge and connecting to customer origins.
• Contribute to Pingora and 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, including technical design, implementation, automated testing, observability, staged rollouts, and production operations.
• Participate in on-call rotation, lead incident response and postmortems, and improve reliability, capacity, and operational tooling.
• Use traffic cohorts, measurable guardrails, and rollback mechanisms to introduce high-impact changes safely.
• Partner with product and engineering teams that depend on or extend the cache and proxy platform.
• Contribute through code review, mentorship, written communication, and improvements to team standards and tooling.

Requirements

• At least 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 willingness to work in Rust.
• Strong understanding of HTTP semantics and transport protocols including TCP, TLS, and QUIC.
• Experience designing and implementing secure, resilient, high-performance distributed systems.
• Experience with Linux systems, networking, concurrency, and performance analysis.
• Production ownership experience, including monitoring, debugging, on-call, incident response, and reliability improvements.
• Experience using metrics, logs, traces, profiling, and experiments to understand production behavior and validate improvements.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including technical design writing and cross-team project leadership.
• Willingness to use AI-assisted engineering tools while maintaining accountability for correctness, security, and design quality.

Nice to Have

• Professional experience with Rust or high-performance asynchronous systems.
• Experience with caches, HTTP proxies, CDNs, distributed storage, or latency-sensitive data-plane services.
• Experience analyzing memory use, disk I/O, resource contention, and tail latency in production systems.
• Experience building APIs or distributed control planes using event streaming, relational databases, or analytical data systems.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes, Kafka, PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, or similar infrastructure.
• Experience contributing to open-source software or leading multi-team engineering programs.

Compensation

• San Francisco estimated base salary: $194,000–$266,000.
• Seattle, Washington, D.C., and New York estimated base salary: $185,000–$254,000.
• Denver, Austin, Illinois, and Atlanta estimated base salary: $168,000–$231,000.
• Eligible to participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan.