Distributed Systems Engineer - Data Platform (Delivery, Database, Retrieval) · Cloudflare

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 15:37:26 GMT
Engineering

Cloudflare · Hybrid · hybrid

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.

We protect and accelerate 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.

About Role

We are looking for experienced and highly motivated engineers to join our DATA Org and help build the future of data at Cloudflare. Our organisation is responsible for the entire data lifecycle - from ingestion and processing to storage and retrieval - powering the critical logs and analytics that provide our customers with real-time visibility into the health and performance of their online properties.

Our mission is to empower customers to leverage their data to drive better outcomes for their business. We build and maintain a suite of high-performance, scalable systems that handle more than a billion events in a second.

As an engineer in our organisation, you will have the opportunity to work on complex distributed systems challenges across different parts of our data stack.

Responsibilities

As a Software Engineer in our Data Organisation depending on the team you join, you will focus on a subset of the following areas:

Design, develop, and maintain scalable and reliable distributed systems across the entire data lifecycle.

Build and optimise key components of our high-throughput data delivery platform to ensure data integrity and low-latency delivery.

Develop new and improve existing components for the Cloudflare Analytical Platform to extend functionality and performance.

Scale, monitor, and maintain the performance of our large-scale database clusters to accommodate the growing volume of data.

Develop and enhance our customer-facing GraphQL APIs, log delivery, and alerting solutions, focusing on performance, reliability, and user experience.

Work to identify and remove bottlenecks across our data platforms, from streamlining data ingestion processes to optimising query performance.

Collaborate with other teams across Cloudflare to understand their data needs and build solutions that empower them to make data-driven decisions.

Collaborate with the ClickHouse open-source community to add new features and contribute to the upstream codebase.

Participate in the development of the next generation of our data platforms, including researching and evaluating new technologies and approaches.

Key Qualifications

3+ years of experience working in software development covering distributed systems and databases.

Strong programming skills (Golang is preferable), as well as a deep understanding of software development best practices and principles.

Hands-on experience with modern observability stacks, including Prometheus, Grafana, and a strong understanding of handling high-cardinality metrics at scale.

Strong knowledge of SQL and database internals, including experience with database design, optimisation, and performance tuning.

A solid foundation in computer science, including algorithms, data structures, distributed systems, and concurrency.

Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with a willingness to debug, troubleshoot, and learn about complex problems at high scale.

Ability to work collaboratively in a team environment and communicate effectively with other teams across Cloudflare.

Experience with ClickHouse is a plus.

Experience with data streaming technologies (e.g., Kafka, Flink) is a plus.

Experience developing and scaling APIs, particularly GraphQL, is a plus.

Experience with Infrastructure as Code tools like SALT or Terraform is a plus.

Experience with Linux container technologies, such as Docker and Kubernetes, is a plus.

If you're passionate about building scalable and performant data platforms using cutting-edge technologies and want to work with a world-class team of engineers, then we want to hear from you!

Join us in our mission to help build a better internet for everyone!

This role requires flexibility to be on-call outside of standard working hours to address technical issues as needed.

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 organisations 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 ad