Senior Software Engineer, Distributed Databases

CloudFlare; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 185,000 - 254,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity plan

Health benefits

Job summary

Cloudflare is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to own distributed database systems across its edge network, powering services like R2 and Workers KV. This role sits in the Emerging Technologies & Incubation group and focuses on reliability, performance, and scalability.

You will work across Go, Rust, and infrastructure tooling to add features, optimize data placement, and improve observability, with production-grade changes from inception to rollout.

Qualifications

• Experience with distributed databases or storage systems (e.g., CockroachDB, TiKV, YugabyteDB).
• Strong programming in Go, Rust, or C++.
• Understanding of consensus protocols (Raft/Paxos) and MVCC.
• Ability to read, debug, modify large codebases under correctness constraints.
• Familiarity with LS M-tree storage engines (RocksDB, LevelDB, Pebble).
• Knowledge of storage basics: block devices, filesystems, SSDs.
• Experience with infrastructure as code and monitoring (Prometheus, Grafana).

Responsibilities

• Own distributed database systems across Cloudflare's edge network powering services like R2 and Workers KV.
• Add features and extensions to meet R2, Durable Objects, and Workers KV needs.
• Ensure correctness via code review, tests, and staged rollouts to prevent customer impact.
• Tune performance and resource use across staged rollouts and production.
• Collaborate on data placement, replication and schema design with other teams.
• Build observability and tooling to support the database across consumers.

Skills

Go

Rust

C++

Distributed systems

Database internals

Performance tuning

Observability tooling

Networking fundamentals

Go, Rust, C++

Tools

Saltstack

Terraform

Prometheus

Grafana

Clickhouse

Job description

Senior Software Engineer, Distributed Databases

In-Office

About the Role

Emerging Technologies & Incubation (ETI) is where new and bold products are built and released within Cloudflare. ETI's Storage Infrastructure team is responsible for the core storage layer that underpins many of ETI's stateful services. Our scope ranges from managing the physical hardware to operating the distributed databases and storage systems built upon it. We run this infrastructure globally across Cloudflare's network, which presents unique and complex engineering puzzles. We navigate efficiently expanding storage capacity, optimizing rebuild operations, and coordinating operations across failure domains to uphold durability. While other service teams focus on product development, our mission is to ensure the underlying storage is reliable, fast, and scalable.

You'll be joining a highly motivated team that is building the next generation of Cloudflare’s distributed storage services.

Responsibilities

In this role, you will own the distributed database systems that run across Cloudflare's edge network and power services such as R2, Durable Objects, and Workers KV. We expect you to go a layer deeper than a database operator to fix the underlying problems. You will own your code from inception through production rollout. On any given day, you might:

• Add new features and extensions to the database to meet the needs of R2, Durable Objects, and Workers KV
• Hold the bar on correctness through code review, testing, and staged rollout so defects are caught before customer impact
• Tune performance and resource utilization across staged rollouts and production
• Optimize data placement and replication for our edge topology, and partner with service teams on schema design and query performance
• Build the observability and tooling that make the database supportable across its consumers
• You can expect to interact with a variety of languages and technologies including Go, Rust, Saltstack, and Terraform.

Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience

• Source-code level experience contributing to a distributed database or distributed storage system. Examples include distributed SQL databases (CockroachDB, TiDB / TiKV, YugabyteDB, Spanner), Raft-based or Paxos-based storage systems (etcd, FoundationDB), wide-column stores (Cassandra, ScyllaDB), document databases (MongoDB), or comparable systems
• Strong programming skills in Go, Rust, C++, or another systems language, with a willingness to be productive in Go for this role
• Deep understanding of distributed systems concepts: consensus protocols (Raft or Paxos), data replication, MVCC, transaction isolation levels, fault tolerance, and partition tolerance
• Experience reading, debugging, and modifying complex codebases under correctness constraints (concurrency, durability, consistency)
• Familiarity with LSM-tree storage engines (RocksDB, LevelDB, Pebble, SlateDB) or comparable storage internals
• Familiarity with storage fundamentals: block devices, filesystems, SSD characteristics
• Experience building and maintaining high-throughput, low-latency systems
• Understanding of network fundamentals as they relate to distributed storage: bandwidth constraints, latency tradeoffs, cross-datacenter replication
• Experience with infrastructure configuration tooling and infrastructure as code
• Experience with monitoring tools (Prometheus, Grafana) and analytics tools (Clickhouse) for operating production database systems
• Strong written and verbal communication skills and ability to explain technical decisions clearly
• Comfortable operating in fast-paced environments with tight deadlines and evolving priorities

Compensation

Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.

• For New York City, New Jersey, Washington, Washington DC, and California (excluding Bay Area) based hires: Estimated annual salary of $185,000 - $254,000

Equity

This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan.

Benefits

• Health & welfare benefits described in the policy

Cloudflare is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, or any other basis protected by law.