Principal Software Engineer: Distributed Systems
Principal IC owning technical coherence of Cloudflare's Intent Management platform for safe, health-mediated configuration changes and deployments across global distributed storage, progressive releases, and testing systems. Requires 10+ years experience leading large-scale distributed systems initiatives, strong technical leadership, LLM integration, and expertise in at least one modern strongly-typed language.
About the job
What you'll do
Too many of Cloudflare's most impactful incidents have had unsafe change as a root cause. The Intent Management exists to make safe change the easy button and this is the most senior IC role in that organization, reporting directly to the Senior Director. You will own the technical coherence of a platform that spans globally distributed key-value storage, progressive release and configuration delivery, and the testing and health-mediation systems that prove change is safe. You'll work at the seams that matter most by translating what Cloudflare's Edge and control-plane platforms need into the primitives our teams build. You'll move fluidly between writing production code, designing new systems, and reviewing the proposals of other senior engineers. You’ll also help us work out how best to integrate LLMs into our processes and systems.
You will be working alongside engineers who have presented at DevOps Days, Config Management Camp 2024 & 2025, Monitorama, OSMC, KubeCon and PromCon. Together you will deliver on the key Health Mediated Deployment projects that are being tracked through senior leadership of Cloudflare up to the founders.
Requirements
- 10+ years of software engineering experience with a demonstrated history of leading complex, organization-wide technical initiatives that delivered measurable improvements to system performance, reliability, security, developer productivity, or engineering culture.
- Strong track record of technical leadership and influence without direct authority, including driving consensus on technical decisions across multiple teams, mentoring senior engineers, and establishing architectural patterns that are widely adopted across an organization.
- Experience designing, building and managing high volume, global scale software applications.
- Expert in at least one modern strongly-typed programming language.
- Knowledge of API design standards, patterns and best practices.
- Experience working with top tier LLMs to plan, write, test, and deploy software.
Nice-to-haves
- Strong interpersonal and communication skills with a bias towards action.
- Experience with scaling and simplifying high scale Configuration Management systems.
- Familiarity with Google’s Prodspec and Annealing systems.
- Experience with Kubernetes.
- Experience with RocksDB or similar data stores.
- Experience with health checking and probe platforms at significant scale.
- Public evidence of technical leadership such as conference talks on distributed systems or security, widely-read technical blog posts, significant open source contributions, or published architectural patterns that have been adopted by the broader engineering community.
Compensation
For Bay Area based hires: Estimated annual salary of $230,000 - $288,000.
For Washington and New York City based hires: Estimated annual salary of $220,000 - $275,000.
For Austin based hires: Estimated annual salary of $200,000 - $250,000.
This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan.
Skills
Distributed Systems, Configuration Management, Kubernetes, Rocksdb, Llm Integration, API Design, Strongly Typed Languages, Health Checking, Probe Platforms, Global Scale Applications
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