Distributed Systems Engineer - Data Platform - Analytics and Alerts

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.

Locations Available: London (UK), Lisbon (Portugal), Austin (US), Denver (US), Atlanta (US)

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. Our Data Organisation is strategically composed of several key teams, each focusing on a distinct aspect of our comprehensive data platform:

• Data Delivery / Data Pipeline: This team is responsible for the design, development, and operation of our distributed data delivery pipeline. This system is a high‑throughput, low‑latency powerhouse, primarily written in Go, and is tasked with ingesting, processing, and intelligently routing massive volumes of data originating from across Cloudflare’s vast global network to multiple core destinations.
• Analytical Database Platform: Engineers on this team contribute to and evolve our core analytical platform, which is powered by ClickHouse. This team is dedicated to building and maintaining a high‑performance, scalable database platform meticulously optimised for the immense analytical workloads generated by all of Cloudflare’s products and services.
• Data Retrieval (Customer‑Facing Products): This department is focused on building and continuously improving our customer‑facing products, making data not only accessible but also genuinely actionable for our users.

Responsibilities

• Develop and enhance our customer‑facing APIs focusing on performance, reliability, and an intuitive user experience.
• Design, build, and maintain our near real‑time alerting platform, from data processing and anomaly detection to reliable notification delivery.
• Optimise the performance of complex analytical queries that power our APIs and dashboards, working closely with the database platform team.
• Create intuitive and powerful tools that allow customers to explore their data and configure meaningful alerts based on logs and metrics.
• Scale our API and alerting infrastructure to support a growing number of internal and external use cases.
• Collaborate with front‑end engineers and product managers to define API contracts and deliver a seamless data experience for our users.
• Ensure the operational health of our APIs and alerting systems by developing comprehensive monitoring, and participating in an on‑call rotation.

Key Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience working in software development covering distributed systems and scalable APIs.
• Strong programming skills (Go is preferable), with a deep understanding of software development best practices for building performant, customer‑facing services.
• 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, including extensive experience with complex query optimisation.
• 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 developing and scaling APIs, particularly GraphQL, is a strong plus.
• Experience with data streaming technologies (e.g., Kafka, Flink) for real‑time processing 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!

This position may require access to information protected under U.S. export control laws, including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations.

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.