[Hiring] Distributed Systems Engineer @Cloudflare Events

Role Description

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.

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.

Engineers in this role typically develop depth in one of two areas:

• Analytical database systems: Building and operating our ClickHouse-based analytical platform, improving database performance, reliability, and scalability.
• Data delivery and retrieval: Building streaming pipelines, public APIs, log delivery integrations, and alerting systems that make customer data accessible and actionable.

We are looking for strong backend and systems fundamentals, production operational experience, and demonstrated depth in at least one of these areas.

What You’ll Do

• Design, build, and operate reliable distributed systems that process very large volumes of data.
• Develop and optimise backend services and data platform components, primarily in Go.
• Improve data integrity, delivery latency, query performance, availability, and operational efficiency.
• Build systems that handle failure safely through techniques such as backpressure, retries, idempotency, replication, and graceful degradation.
• Define service-level objectives, monitor production health, plan capacity, and respond to incidents.
• Diagnose performance bottlenecks across ingestion, processing, storage, and retrieval.
• Depending on your area of focus:
• Build and operate large-scale ClickHouse clusters and contribute improvements to the ClickHouse ecosystem.
• Develop data delivery pipelines that route data from Cloudflare’s global network to customer destinations.
• Build and scale GraphQL APIs, log delivery integrations, and near real-time alerting products.
• Collaborate with product and engineering teams to understand their data needs and design pragmatic solutions.
• Evaluate technologies and contribute to the next generation of Cloudflare’s data platform.
• Participate in an on-call rotation for the production systems owned by your team.

Qualifications

• At least three years of professional software engineering experience building backend, infrastructure, database, or distributed-data systems.
• Strong Go programming skills, or substantial systems programming experience (Rust, C++) with the ability to become productive in Go quickly.
• Experience building and operating production services, including deployment, monitoring, capacity planning, incident response, and debugging.
• A solid understanding of distributed-systems concepts, including concurrency, consistency, fault tolerance, partitioning, and data integrity.
• Experience with high-throughput or low-latency data processing.
• Hands-on experience with observability tools such as Prometheus and Grafana, including monitoring high-cardinality workloads.
• Strong analytical and troubleshooting skills, particularly for complex production problems.
• Clear communication and an ability to collaborate across engineering and product teams.
• Demonstrated depth in at least one of the following areas:
• Database systems: SQL, analytical databases, database internals, query optimisation, performance tuning, or operating large database clusters.
• Data delivery and retrieval: Streaming systems, event-driven architectures, data pipelines, API development, or customer-facing data integrations.

Helpful Experience

• ClickHouse or another large-scale analytical database.
• Kafka, Flink, or similar streaming technologies.
• GraphQL or other high-volume API technologies.
• Terraform, Salt, or other Infrastructure as Code tooling.
• Docker, Kubernetes, or Linux container technologies.
• Contributions to open-source database or distributed-systems projects.

Compensation

• Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.
• For Portugal based hires: Estimated annual salary is between €54,000 - €91,000.
• For Colorado based hires: Estimated annual salary of $156,000 - $215,000.

Equity

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

Benefits

• Cloudflare offers a complete package of benefits and programs to support you and your family.
• Health & Welfare Benefits:
• Medical/Rx Insurance
• Dental Insurance
• Vision Insurance
• Flexible Spending Accounts
• Commuter Spending Accounts
• Fertility & Family Forming Benefits
• On-demand mental health support and Employee Assistance Program
• Global Travel Medical Insurance
• Financial Benefits:
• Short and Long Term Disability Insurance
• Life & Accident Insurance
• 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan
• Employee Stock Participation Plan
• Time Off:
• Flexible paid time off covering vacation and sick leave
• Leave programs, including parental, pregnancy health, medical, and bereavement leave