# Senior Systems Engineer, AI Gateway

**Company:** [Cloudflare](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/cloudflare)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA
**Role:** Fullstack Engineering
**Salary:** $194k – $266k/yr
**Experience:** 5+ years
**Skills:** Distributed Systems, APIs, Observability, Networking, reliability engineering, TypeScript, Go, Rust, AI Infrastructure, LLMs, proxy systems, edge computing, SDKs, developer platforms
**Posted:** 2026-07-23

> Senior Systems Engineer building Cloudflare's AI Gateway: core infrastructure for high-volume multi-provider AI inference at the network edge. Design APIs, routing, observability, and developer tools while dogfooding AI-native workflows to ship durable, production systems quickly.

## Job Description

## 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.

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