Senior Software Engineer, Distributed Databases in London

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.

Available Locations: Austin, TX; Seattle, WA or London, UK

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.

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. 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.
• 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
• Understanding of network fundamentals as they relate to distributed storage: bandwidth constraints, latency tradeoffs, cross-datacenter replication
• 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 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.

This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan. Cloudflare offers a complete package of benefits and programs to support you and your family.

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.