Senior Systems Engineer, AI Gateway

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.

Requirements

• 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.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience building AI/ML infrastructure, inference platforms, model gateways, LLM-powered applications, or provider abstraction layers.
• Experience building developer-facing APIs, SDKs, CLIs, dashboards, or platform products at scale.
• Hands-on experience with proxy, edge, gateway, routing, or traffic management systems.
• Familiarity with the current AI ecosystem: model providers, model capabilities, agent frameworks, inference patterns, and the rough edges developers hit in practice.
• Experience with cost controls, rate limits, caching, retries, fallbacks, evaluation, or observability for AI workloads.
• Experience with TypeScript, Go, Rust, or similar systems/backend languages.
• You have built or heavily customized your own agentic development environment: custom agents, harnesses, tools, or workflows that changed how you ship.
• You have built something with AI Gateway, Workers AI, or a competing product, and have opinions about what is missing.
• A track record of writing publicly about developer tools, infrastructure, systems, or AI products you have built.

Compensation & Benefits

Compensation

• For Bay Area based hires: Estimated annual salary of $194,000-266,000
• Equity: This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan.

Benefits

• Health & Welfare: Medical/Rx Insurance, Dental Insurance, Vision Insurance, Flexible Spending Accounts, Commuter Spending Accounts, Fertility & Family Forming Benefits, On-demand mental health support and Employee Assistance Program, Global Travel Medical Insurance.
• Financial: Short and Long Term Disability Insurance, Life & Accident Insurance, 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan, Employee Stock Participation Plan.
• Time Off: Flexible paid time off covering vacation and sick leave, Leave programs including parental, pregnancy health, medical, and bereavement leave.