Distributed Systems Engineer

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate production distributed systems at scale with provable geographic boundaries for data localization.
• Work across the full stack in Go and Rust, including low-level policy enforcement, cryptographic key routing at the edge, customer-facing APIs, and dashboards.
• Own the design, implementation, rollout, and production operation of systems built on Cloudflare's edge fleet, globally distributed key-value storage, Workers, Durable Objects, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, and regional ClickHouse.
• Ensure compliance correctness as a hard constraint, reasoning about failure modes with real consequences for customers under regulatory scrutiny.
• Participate in on-call, incident response, post-mortems, and continuous investment in reliability and performance.
• Write clear design documents and collaborate across time zones.

Requirements

• 3+ 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++, with willingness to work in others.
• Solid grasp of distributed systems fundamentals: consistency and consensus models (Paxos/Raft), replication/sharding/partitioning tradeoffs, failure modes (partial failure, network partitions, split brain, clock skew), idempotency, retries, backpressure, timeouts, circuit breakers, rate limiting, health checking, failure detection, leader election, graceful degradation.
• Observability: metrics, logs, and tracing as design inputs.
• Practical experience with API design (REST or gRPC), relational databases, and asynchronous messaging or event streaming systems, with understanding of transactional and consistency boundaries.
• Comfortable with AI-assisted development tooling while maintaining accountability for correctness, security, and design quality.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.

Nice-to-Haves

• 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.