# Distributed Systems Engineer

**Company:** [Cloudflare](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/cloudflare)
**Location:** Unspecified
**Role:** Backend Engineering
**Experience:** 3+ years
**Skills:** Go, Rust, Distributed Systems, consensus algorithms, paxos, raft, replication, sharding, partitioning, gRPC, Postgres, Kubernetes, Observability, Cryptography
**Posted:** 2026-07-17

> 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.

## Job Description

## 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.

## Similar roles

- [Distributed Systems Software Engineer](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/0bdf8a98-9919-41f3-9ddd-28ee454bc843) - Confluent - Remote - $197k – $271k/yr
- [Product Engineer](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/498ef149-7a26-44a0-b564-a9117498f710) - E2b - San Francisco, CA - $175k – $250k/yr
- [Backend Engineer](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/486b1000-656e-4ef1-bc28-28e0454b38e5) - Arena - California
- [Software Engineer, Platform](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/597ece11-028f-481b-9978-3e88fece7fdf) - Scale AI - San Francisco, CA - $180k – $225k/yr
- [Software Engineer, Codex -Enterprise Controls](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/9fc148ac-afcb-4558-a41e-a772e8869a71) - OpenAI - San Francisco, CA - $230k – $385k/yr

**Apply:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/aedb6421-f884-4088-a576-d590865229d6
**Canonical:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/aedb6421-f884-4088-a576-d590865229d6