Principal Systems Engineer

What you'll do

You'll own the GTM-facing software and data products our sales motion runs on, end to end. That includes the data foundation underneath it and the signals that flag which accounts a rep should act on and when. You'll also lead our hardest cross-functional projects, the ones that span many teams and systems. You'll drive them to delivery, keep partner teams on track, and do it with a lot of autonomy.

Day to day you'll improve how we visualize pipeline, build sales tools that flag the right moment to reach out to a customer, and make the developer buying journey smoother. The work is a mix of data engineering, full-stack product, and applied AI, and you'll build it on Cloudflare's own developer platform.

This role fits someone who works well in a fast-paced, ambiguous environment, likes turning messy business problems into working software, and can juggle several priorities at once.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement features in a Golang, Typescript and SQL.
• Build and operate production services on Cloudflare Workers and Kubernetes.
• Own the data foundation including Query Engine, Workflows, MCP/APIs and other internal facing products and services.
• Own projects end to end; from design docs and schema changes through implementation, testing, deployment, and production monitoring.
• Participate in on call rotations, drive incident resolution, and write postmortems that improve reliability.
• Use AI tools extensively to accelerate development, debugging, and operational tasks. We expect engineers to leverage AI as a core part of their workflow.
• Collaborate across teams to coordinate capacity planning, API contracts, and cross cutting initiatives.
• Embed with Sales, Marketing, Developer Relations (DevRel), and Growth to turn fuzzy operational pain into shipped software.
• Help set the standard for GTM engineering organization wide.

Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with a demonstrated history of leading complex, organization-wide data initiatives.
• Deep expertise in building distributed systems and production infrastructure at scale, with proficiency in Go and strong working knowledge of TypeScript.
• Exceptional ability to navigate ambiguous problem spaces, identify the highest-impact technical work, and drive projects autonomously from conception through adoption—balancing pragmatic execution with long-term technical excellence.
• Deep analytical SQL and data modeling experience. Proven ability to manage complexity even at thousands of tables.
• Able to debug database and query performance issues using profiling tools and source code where applicable.

Please be prepared to discuss specific examples of organization-wide technical initiatives you've led, particularly distributed systems or data infrastructure and their measurable business impact.

Nice to have

• Previous experience as a Principal Engineer, Staff+ engineer, or technical leader on platform, infrastructure, or task force teams that operate outside traditional product roadmaps with a focus on enabling GTM organizations.
• Columnar/OLAP or lakehouse experience (ClickHouse, DuckDB, BigQuery, Snowflake, Iceberg, Starrocks).
• Familiarity with the Salesforce data model and CRM/API integrations.
• Familiarity with deploying to bare metal and Kubernetes.
• Experience on Cloudflare Workers / edge platforms and analytics-engineering (dbt) workflows.
• Background in SaaS or product-led growth (PLG) GTM motions.

Compensation

Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location. Equity This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan.