# Senior Distributed Systems Engineer

**Company:** [Cloudflare](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/cloudflare)
**Location:** Austin, TX
**Role:** Backend Engineering
**Experience:** 5+ years
**Skills:** Go, Rust, c/c++, Distributed Systems, consensus, paxos, raft, replication, sharding, partitioning, API Design, gRPC, Postgres, Kubernetes, Observability
**Posted:** 2026-07-21

> Build and operate distributed backend services enforcing geographic data residency boundaries on Cloudflare's global edge network. Requires 5+ years building production distributed systems with deep knowledge of consistency, failure modes, and compliance constraints; full-stack ownership in Go/Rust.

## Job Description

## Role Responsibilities
- Design, build, and operate backend services that enforce regional boundaries on where customer data is stored, processed, and decrypted, across a globally distributed edge network.
- Contribute to end-to-end feature delivery — write technical designs and RFCs, implement services and libraries, add tests and observability, drive rollout, and own the resulting systems in production.
- Partner with engineers on adjacent platforms, cryptography, networking, data, and product teams to integrate residency guarantees into new and existing surfaces without regressing performance or reliability for other customers.
- Reason carefully about failure modes, consistency, and blast radius; design systems that fail closed for compliance while degrading gracefully for availability, and make these tradeoffs explicit in design docs.
- Participate in on-call for your services, lead incident response and post-mortems, and continually invest in reliability, capacity planning, and cost.
- Raise the engineering bar through code review, mentorship, and clear written communication; contribute to the team's engineering standards and tooling.

## Role Requirements
- 5+ years of professional experience designing, building, and operating production distributed systems at scale.
- Strong proficiency in at least one system or backend language such as Go, Rust, or C/C++, and a willingness to work in others as the codebase demands.
- Solid grasp of distributed systems fundamentals, including:
  - Consistency and consensus models (strong, sequential, eventual; Paxos / Raft at a conceptual level).
  - Replication, sharding, and partitioning strategies, and their tradeoffs against availability and latency.
  - Failure modes: partial failure, network partitions, split brain, clock skew, and how these show up in real systems.
  - Idempotency, retries, backpressure, timeouts, circuit breakers, and rate limiting as first-class design concerns.
  - Health checking, failure detection, leader election, and graceful degradation.
  - Observability: metrics, logs, and tracing as design inputs, not afterthoughts.
- Practical experience with API design (REST or gRPC), relational databases, and asynchronous messaging or event streaming systems, with a clear understanding of transactional and consistency boundaries.
- Comfortable with AI-assisted development tooling, with the judgment to use it to accelerate work while remaining accountable for correctness, security, and design quality.
- Track record of production ownership: on-call, incident response, post-mortems, and continuous investment in reliability and performance.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills; ability to write clear design documents and collaborate effectively across time zones.

## Nice-to-Have Skills
- Experience building compliance-driven, security-sensitive, or multi-region systems.
- Familiarity with cryptography basics — envelope encryption, key management, HSMs, or PKI.
- Exposure to edge, CDN, or L4/L7 proxy platforms, or to large-scale globally distributed storage or key-value systems.
- Experience contributing to or driving multi-team, multi-quarter engineering programs with cross-functional dependencies across platform, security, and product teams.

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