Distributed Systems Engineer - Data Platform (Delivery, Database, Retrieval)

About this role

<div class="content-intro"><h3>About Us</h3> <p>At Cloudflare, we are on a mission to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world’s largest networks that powers millions of websites and other Internet properties for customers ranging from individual bloggers to SMBs to Fortune 500 companies. Cloudflare protects and accelerates any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. Internet properties powered by Cloudflare all have web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with every request. As a result, they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. Cloudflare was named to Entrepreneur Magazine’s Top Company Cultures list and ranked among the World’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company.</p> <p>At Cloudflare, we’re not looking for people who wait for a polished roadmap; we’re looking for the builders who see the cracks in the Internet that everyone else has simply learned to live with. We value candidates who have the instinct to spot a "normalized" problem and the AI-native curiosity to create a solution using the latest tools. Our culture is built on iteration, leveraging AI to ship faster today to make it better tomorrow, while ensuring that every improvement, no matter how small, is shared across the team to lift everyone up. If you’re the type of person who values curiosity over bureaucracy, and that AI is a partner in solving tough problems to keep the Internet moving forward, you’ll fit right in.</p></div><h3>Available Locations</h3> <ul> <li>Atlanta, US</li> <li>Austin, US</li> <li>Denver, US</li> <li>Lisbon, Portugal</li> <li>Seattle, US</li> <li>Washington DC, US</li> </ul> <p><strong>Applications will be accepted until November 23, 2026.</strong></p> <h2>About the Role</h2> <p>Cloudflare’s Data Org builds the systems that ingest, process, store, and retrieve data generated across our global network. These systems power the logs, analytics, and alerts that give customers near real-time visibility into the security, reliability, and performance of their Internet properties.</p> <p><strong>&nbsp;</strong></p> <p>We are looking for systems-oriented backend engineers who enjoy solving distributed-systems problems at large scale. You will build primarily in Go, operate the systems you create, and work across the data lifecycle, from high-throughput ingestion and delivery to analytical storage and customer-facing retrieval.</p> <p><strong>&nbsp;</strong></p> <p>Engineers in this role typically develop depth in one of two areas:</p> <ol> <li>Analytical database systems: Building and operating our ClickHouse-based analytical platform, improving database performance, reliability, and scalability.</li> <li>Data delivery and retrieval: Building streaming pipelines, public APIs, log delivery integrations, and alerting systems that make customer data accessible and actionable.</li> </ol> <p><strong>&nbsp;</strong></p> <p>We are looking for strong backend and systems fundamentals, production operational experience, and demonstrated depth in at least one of these areas.</p> <h2>What You’ll Do</h2> <ul> <li>Design, build, and operate reliable distributed systems that process very large volumes of data.</li> <li>Develop and optimise backend services and data platform components, primarily in Go.</li> <li>Improve data integrity, delivery latency, query performance, availability, and operational efficiency.</li> <li>Build systems that handle failure safely through techniques such as backpressure, retries, idempotency, replication, and graceful degradation.</li> <li>Define service-level objectives, monitor production health, plan capacity, and respond to incidents.</li> <li>Diagnose performance bottlenecks across ingestion, processing, storage, and retrieval.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Depending on your area of focus:</strong></p> <ul> <li>Build and operate large-scale ClickHouse clusters and contribute improvements to the ClickHouse ecosystem.</li> <li>Develop data delivery pipelines that route data from Cloudflare’s global network to customer destinations.</li> <li>Build and scale GraphQL APIs, log delivery integrations, and near real-time alerting products.</li> <li>Collaborate with product and engineering teams to understand their data needs and design pragmatic solutions.</li> <li>Evaluate technologies and contribute to the next generation of Cloudflare’s data platform.</li> <li>Participate in an on-call rotation for the production systems owned by your team.</li> </ul> <h2>What We’re Looking For</h2> <ul> <li>At least three years of professional software engineering experience building backend, infrastructure, database, or distributed-data systems.</li> <li>Strong Go programming skills, or substantial systems programming experience (Rust, C++) with the ability to become productive in Go quickly.</li> <li>Experience building and operating production services, including deployment, monitoring, capacity planning, incident response, and debugging.</li> <li>A solid understanding of distributed-systems concepts, including concurrency, consistency, fault tolerance, partitioning, and data integrity.</li> <li>Experience with high-throughput or low-latency data processing.</li> <li>Hands-on experience with observability tools such as Prometheus and Grafana, including monitoring high-cardinality workloads.</li> <li>Strong analytical and troubleshooting skills, particularly for complex production problems.</li> <li>Clear communication and an ability to collaborate across engineering and product teams.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Demonstrated depth in at least one of the following areas:</strong></p> <ul> <li>Database systems: SQL, analytical databases, database internals, query optimisation, performance tuning, or operating large database clusters.</li> <li>Data delivery and retrieval: Streaming systems, event-driven architectures, data pipelines, API development, or customer-facing data integrations.</li> </ul> <h2>Helpful Experience</h2> <ul> <li>ClickHouse or another large-scale analytical database.</li> <li>Kafka, Flink, or similar streaming technologies.</li> <li>GraphQL or other high-volume API technologies.</li> <li>Terraform, Salt, or other Infrastructure as Code tooling.</li> <li>Docker, Kubernetes, or Linux container technologies.</li> <li>Contributions to open-source database or distributed-systems projects.</li> </ul> <p>If you enjoy building efficient systems, understanding how they behave in production, and solving data problems at global scale, we would like to hear from you.</p> <h3>Compensation</h3> <p>Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.</p> <ul> <li>For Portugal based hires: Estimated annual salary is between €54,000 - €91,000.</li> <li>For Colorado based hires: Estimated annual salary of $136,000 - $187,000.</li> <li>For Washington based hires: Estimated annual salary of $150,000 - $206,000</li> </ul> <h3>Equity</h3> <p>This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare's equity plan.</p> <h3>Benefits</h3> <p>Cloudflare offers a complete package of benefits and programs to support you and your family. Our benefits programs can help you pay health care expenses, support caregiving, build capital for the future and make life a little easier and fun! The below is a description of our benefits for employees in the United States, and benefits may vary for employees based outside the U.S.</p> <p>Health &amp; Welfare Benefits</p> <ul> <li>Medical/Rx Insurance</li> <li>Dental Insurance</li> <li>Vision Insurance</li> <li>Flexible Spending Accounts</li> <li>Commuter Spending Accounts</li> <li>Fertility &amp; Family Forming Benefits</li> <li>On-demand mental health support and Employee Assistance Program</li> <li>Global Travel Medical Insurance</li> </ul> <p>Financial Benefits</p> <ul> <li>Short and Long Term Disability Insurance</li> <li>Life &amp; Accident Insurance</li> <li>401(k) Ret