Distributed Systems Engineer
Build and operate distributed systems infrastructure for data localization and geographic compliance on Cloudflare's global edge network. Requires 3+ years building production distributed systems with deep knowledge of consistency models, failure modes, and languages like Go or Rust.
About the job
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.
Skills
Go, Rust, Distributed Systems, Consensus Algorithms, Paxos, Raft, Replication, Sharding, Partitioning, gRPC, Postgres, Kubernetes, Observability, Cryptography
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