Senior Distributed Systems Engineer - Cache

About Us 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. 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. Available Locations: Atlanta, GA, Austin, TX, Champaign, IL, Denver, CO, New York, NY, San Francisco, CA, Seattle, WA, Washington, DC About the Department Cloudflare's Engineering Team builds and runs the software that helps power millions of Internet properties. Product development covers both new features and functionality as well as scaling our existing software to meet the challenges of a massively growing customer base. The Content Delivery group helps make the Internet faster, safer, and more reliable by building and optimizing one of the world's largest CDNs. Role Summary The Cache team builds and operates the high-performance reverse proxy and caching data plane at Cloudflare's edge. Built on Pingora, Cloudflare's open-source Rust framework for fast, reliable network services, this software serves cached content, routes traffic across cache tiers, and connects Cloudflare to customer origins. Its performance, correctness, and resilience directly affect request latency, origin load, and availability across Cloudflare's global network. You will work primarily on the reverse proxy and the services that support it: backend routing and load balancing, cache storage and indexing, globally distributed purge, Tiered Cache routing, and production observability. These systems are also foundational building blocks for teams across Cloudflare, which use the proxy, caching, routing, and purge capabilities to power their own products. The team carries these capabilities through shared internal interfaces, distributed control planes, and customer-facing products including Cache Rules, Tiered Cache, Cache Reserve, Workers Cache API, and Always Online. Features ship end to end: you will help design, implement, test, roll out, and operate the systems you build. This is a good fit if you enjoy problems where latency, correctness, and reliability are hard requirements; where changes must be introduced safely across a global fleet; and where improvements can benefit a significant portion of Internet traffic. Role Responsibilities • Design, build, and operate the high-performance cache and proxy data plane that serves content at Cloudflare's edge and connects to customer origins • Contribute to Pingora and the production services built on it, improving asynchronous I/O, connection handling, memory and disk efficiency, and tail latency • Improve cache correctness and performance through object placement, retention, admission and eviction policies, range-request handling, and resilience to corrupt or incomplete data • Build globally distributed purge and Tiered Cache systems that invalidate content quickly, select efficient cache paths, improve hit rates, and reduce origin load • Deliver shared platform capabilities and customer-facing APIs and rules for cache keys, TTLs, response handling, purge behavior, and programmatic access from Workers • Own features end to end: write technical designs, implement services and libraries, add automated tests and observability, drive staged rollouts, and operate the resulting systems in production • Participate in the team's on-call rotation, lead incident response and post-mortems, and continually improve reliability, capacity, and operational tooling • Reason carefully about failure modes and blast radius, using traffic cohorts, measurable guardrails, and rollback mechanisms to introduce high-impact changes safely • Partner with product and engineering teams across Cloudflare that depend on or extend the cache and proxy platform • Raise the engineering bar through code review, mentorship, clear written communication, and improvements to team standards and tooling Role Requirements (Must-Have Skills) • Minimum 4 years of professional experience designing, building, and operating production software systems • Strong proficiency in at least one systems or backend language such as Rust, Go, C, or C++, with a willingness to work in Rust • Strong understanding of HTTP semantics and transport protocols such as TCP, TLS, and 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, incident response, and ongoing reliability improvements • Experience using metrics, logs, traces, profiling, and experiments to understand production behavior and validate improvements • Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to write clear technical designs and lead projects across team boundaries • Willingness to use AI-assisted engineering tools to accelerate development and investigation while remaining accountable for correctness, security, and design quality Nice-to-Have Skills • Professional experience with Rust or high-performance asynchronous systems • Experience with caches, HTTP proxies, CDNs, distributed storage, or latency-sensitive data-plane services • Experience analyzing memory use, disk I/O, resource contention, and tail latency in production systems • Experience building APIs or distributed control planes using event streaming, relational databases, or analytical data systems • Familiarity with Kubernetes, Kafka, PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, or similar infrastructure • Experience contributing to open-source software or leading multi-team engineering programs Compensation Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location and level. San Francisco Estimated Base salary $194,000 - $266,000. Seattle, Washington D.C., New York Estimated Base salary $185,000 - $254,000. Denver, Austin, Illinois, Atlanta Estimated Base salary $168,000 - $231,000. Equity This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan. What Makes Cloudflare Special? We’re not just a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company. We’re a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company with a soul. Fundamental to our mission to help build a better Internet is protecting the free and open Internet. Project Galileo: Since 2014, we've equipped more than 2,400 journalism and civil society organizations in 111 countries with powerful tools to defend themselves against attacks that would otherwise censor their work, technology already used by Cloudflare’s enterprise customers--at no cost. Athenian Project: In 2017, we created the Athenian Project to ensure that state and local governments have the highest level of protection and reliability for free, so that their constituents have access to election information and voter registration. Since the project, we've provided services to more than 425 local government election websites in 33 states. 1.1.1.1: We released 1.1.1.1 to help fix the foundation of the Internet by building a faster, more secure and privacy-centric public DNS resolver. This is available publicly for everyone to use - it is the first consumer-focused service Cloudflare has ever released. Here’s the deal - we don’t store client IP addresses never, ever. We will continue to abide by our privacy commitment and ensure that no user data is sold to advertisers or used to target consumers. Sound like something you’d like to be a part of? We’d love to hear from you! Please note that applicants who progress to the offer stage of the interview process may be asked to attend an in-person interview within one of the Cloudflare Offices or Cloudflare Hubs. More details about this will be available at that stage of the interview process. This position may require access to information protected under U.S. export control laws, including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations. Please note that any offer of employment may be conditioned on your authorization to receive software or technology controlled under these U.S. export laws without sponsorship for an export license. Cloudflare is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunity for all people and place great value in both diversity and inclusiveness. All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to their, or any other person's, perceived or actual race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, family care status, or any other basis protected by law. We are an AA/Veterans/Disabled Employer. Cloudflare provides reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities. Please tell us if you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job. Examples of reasonable accommodations include, but are not limited to, changing the application process, providing documents in an alternate format, using a sign language interpreter, or using specialized equipment. If you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job, please contact us via e-mail at hr@cloudflare.com or via mail at 101 Townsend St. San Francisco, CA 94107.