Principal Software Engineer, Data

Cloudflare•San Francisco, CA

17h•Onsite

About The Position

We are looking for an experienced, product-minded principal software engineer to help take Town Lake from a fast-growing internal platform into the foundational data infrastructure for the entire company. You’ll lead technical architecture and drive implementation for services across our whole stack, covering areas such as access control, an ingestion framework, AI-driven data classification, a semantic and governance layer, data product/ELT platform, a dashboarding and query tool, and more. We are an agentic first team: we leverage AI deeply and comprehensively to accelerate development and make things possible that wouldn’t be otherwise, and all our tools and services are agentic first for our users and the products they build on top of them. Town Lake is already used by dozens of teams across Cloudflare including Billing, Trust & Safety, Developer Platform, GTM and Support organizations. This is a high-impact, high-visibility role where you’ll work with critical teams across the company to solve real and interesting problems.

Requirements

8+ years of experience as a software engineer with a focus on designing, building and scaling data infrastructure
Proven experience leading technical initiatives in a cross-functional context, working with multiple stakeholders and driving value delivery.
Extensive experience with data infrastructure at scale, including tools like Trino, Spark, Iceberg/Delta Lake, Kafka, Clickhouse, PostgreSQL
Experience designing, building and debugging data pipelines at scale
Proficient using backend languages like Go, Python, Typescript, and Rust, along with SQL
Excellent analytical skills, with a focus on understanding data and how stakeholders use it to drive value
Strong communication skills, especially around articulating technical concepts for technical and non-technical audiences
Experience creating and using agentic development workflows and an AI-first mentality

Nice To Haves

Experience with data orchestration and infrastructure platforms like Airflow and DBT
Experience deploying and managing infrastructure in Kubernetes
Experience with data governance platforms and processes, with a focus on privacy and auditability
Knowledge about machine learning models and MLOps

Responsibilities

Define, design and execute strategic technical architecture for highly visible, highly critical data infrastructure at the company.
Lead the design and development of tools and infrastructure to improve and scale our data infrastructure at Cloudflare.
Lead the design and development of data pipelines and data products to serve customers throughout the company, including tools to automate delivery of those services.
Become a subject matter expert across both our data platforms, tools and infrastructures as well as our data itself to guide and enable stakeholders with data needs.
Work across our tech stack, which includes Kubernetes, Trino, Iceberg, Clickhouse, and PostgreSQL, with software built using Go, Javascript/Typescript, Python, and others.
Mentor and support junior engineers on the team, reinforcing a culture of exceptional delivery and accountability on the team.