Distributed Systems Engineer, Analytical Database Platform

Cloudflare•Austin, TX

About The Position

Cloudflare’s Data Org builds systems that ingest, process, store, and retrieve data generated across its global network. These systems power logs, analytics, and alerts that give customers near real-time visibility into the security, reliability, and performance of their Internet properties. The role is for a systems-oriented backend engineer who builds primarily in Go, operates the systems they create, and works 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 either analytical database systems—building and operating Cloudflare’s ClickHouse-based analytical platform and improving database performance, reliability, and scalability—or data delivery and retrieval—building streaming pipelines, public APIs, log delivery integrations, and alerting systems. The engineer will design, build, and operate distributed systems at large scale, improve data integrity, delivery latency, query performance, availability, and operational efficiency, and contribute to the next generation of Cloudflare’s data platform. The role includes participating in an on-call rotation for the production systems owned by the team. Available locations are Atlanta, Austin, Denver, Lisbon, London, Seattle, and Washington, DC. Applications will be accepted until November 23, 2026. Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location. For Portugal-based hires, estimated annual salary is €54,000–€91,000; for Colorado-based hires, estimated annual salary is $156,000–$215,000. The role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan. Benefits and programs support employees and their families, and may vary for employees outside the United States.

Requirements

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 in Rust or 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.
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 ability to collaborate across engineering and product teams.
Demonstrated depth in database systems, such as SQL, analytical databases, database internals, query optimization, performance tuning, or operating large database clusters; or in data delivery and retrieval, such as streaming systems, event-driven architectures, data pipelines, API development, or customer-facing data integrations.

Nice To Haves

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

Responsibilities

Design, build, and operate reliable distributed systems that process very large volumes of data.
Develop and optimize 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 using 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.
Build and operate large-scale ClickHouse clusters and contribute improvements to the ClickHouse ecosystem, depending on area of focus.
Develop data delivery pipelines that route data from Cloudflare’s global network to customer destinations, depending on area of focus.
Build and scale GraphQL APIs, log delivery integrations, and near real-time alerting products, depending on area of focus.
Collaborate with product and engineering teams to understand 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 the team.

Benefits

Medical/Rx insurance
Dental insurance
Vision insurance
Flexible Spending Accounts
Commuter Spending Accounts
Fertility and family-forming benefits
On-demand mental health support and Employee Assistance Program
Global Travel Medical Insurance
Short- and long-term disability insurance
Life and accident insurance
401(k) Retirement Savings Plan
Employee Stock Participation Plan
Flexible paid time off covering vacation and sick leave
Leave programs, including parental, pregnancy health, medical, and bereavement leave
Equity plan participation