Senior Edge Cache & Proxy Engineer (Rust)

Cloudflare; Champaign (IL); On-site; USD 168,000 - 231,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Job summary

Cloudflare in Champaign, IL is seeking an experienced engineer to join the Cache team at the edge. You will design, build, and operate the high‑performance reverse proxy and cache data plane, contribute to Pingora, and own features end to end from design through rollout and production observability.

This role emphasizes latency, correctness, and reliability at global scale, with on‑call responsibilities, incident response, and close collaboration with product and engineering teams across

Qualifications

• 4+ years of professional experience designing, building, and operating production software systems.
• Proficiency in at least one systems/backend language such as Rust, Go, C, or C++, with willingness to work in Rust.
• Strong understanding of HTTP semantics and transport protocols (TCP, TLS, QUIC).
• Experience designing and implementing secure, resilient, high-performance distributed systems.
• Experience with Linux systems, networking, concurrency, and performance analysis.
• Track record of production ownership including monitoring, debugging, on-call, and reliability improvements.
• Experience using metrics, logs, traces, profiling, and experiments to understand production behavior.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills for cross-team collaboration.
• Willingness to use AI-assisted engineering tools to accelerate development and investigation.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate the high-performance cache and proxy data plane at Cloudflare's edge.
• Contribute to Pingora and production services, improving I/O, connection handling, and latency.
• Improve cache correctness and performance through placement, retention, and eviction policies.
• Build globally distributed purge and Tiered Cache systems to reduce origin load.
• Deliver shared platform capabilities and customer-facing APIs for cache keys, TTLs, and purge behavior.
• Own features end to end: designs, implementations, tests, rollouts, and production operation.
• Participate in on-call rotation, incident response, and post-mortems to improve reliability.
• Reason about failure modes with guardrails and rollback mechanisms.
• Collaborate with product and engineering teams across Cloudflare to extend the cache platform.
• Raise engineering bar through code reviews and tooling improvements.

Skills

Systems design

Programming (Rust/Go/C/C++)

HTTP & Networking

Distributed systems

Linux

Monitoring & debugging

Communication

AI-assisted tools

Tools

Kubernetes

Kafka

PostgreSQL

ClickHouse

Job description

Cloudflare in Champaign, IL is seeking an experienced engineer to join the Cache team at the edge. You will design, build, and operate the high‑performance reverse proxy and cache data plane, contribute to Pingora, and own features end to end from design through rollout and production observability.

This role emphasizes latency, correctness, and reliability at global scale, with on‑call responsibilities, incident response, and close collaboration with product and engineering teams across