Senior Edge Distributed Systems Engineer—Data Residency

Webhosting; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 140,000 - 220,000; Full time

Job summary

Cloudflare is seeking a talented Distributed Systems Engineer to join the Data Localization team. You will design and operate backend services that enforce data residency across a globally distributed edge network, spanning Go and Rust implementations, cryptographic key routing, and customer-facing APIs and dashboards.

You will own end-to-end delivery, collaborate across teams, and ensure compliance with geographic boundaries while maintaining performance and reliability at scale.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional experience designing, building, and operating production distributed systems at scale.
• Strong proficiency in Go, Rust, or C/C++ (one or more).
• Solid grasp of distributed systems fundamentals.
• Experience with consensus models (Paxos/Raft).
• Experience with replication, sharding, partitioning and tradeoffs between availability and latency.
• Experience with failure modes and graceful degradation.
• Knowledge of idempotency, retries, backpressure, timeouts, circuit breakers, and rate limiting.
• Observability: metrics, logs, tracing; design inputs.
• API design (REST or gRPC), relational databases, and asynchronous messaging or streaming systems.
• Comfortable with AI-assisted development tooling; accountability for correctness and design quality.
• Track record of production ownership: on-call, incident response, post-mortems.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate backend services that enforce regional data residency across a globally distributed edge network.
• Contribute to end-to-end feature delivery: write designs, implement services, add tests and observability, drive rollout, own production systems.
• Collaborate with adjacent platforms, cryptography, networking, data, and product teams to integrate residency guarantees without compromising performance or reliability.
• Reason about failure modes, design for fail-closed compliance while degrading gracefully for availability; document tradeoffs.
• Participate in on-call rotations, lead incident responses and post-mortems, invest in reliability and capacity planning.
• Raise engineering standards through code reviews, mentorship, and clear written communication.

Skills

Distributed systems

Go

Rust

C/C++

System fundamentals

Paxos/Raft

Replication/Sharding

Failure modes

Idempotency & retries

Observability

REST/gRPC API design

Relational databases

Messaging systems

AI-assisted development

Production ownership

Communication skills

Job description

Cloudflare is seeking a talented Distributed Systems Engineer to join the Data Localization team. You will design and operate backend services that enforce data residency across a globally distributed edge network, spanning Go and Rust implementations, cryptographic key routing, and customer-facing APIs and dashboards.

You will own end-to-end delivery, collaborate across teams, and ensure compliance with geographic boundaries while maintaining performance and reliability at scale.