Senior Software Engineer, Distributed Databases

Cloudflare • San Francisco, CA

6d

About The Position

Cloudflare is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to work across its Developer Platform database stack, from query planning and execution to transaction processing and durable storage. The role shapes the consistency, durability, and latency guarantees relied on by customer applications. Correctness under concurrency and failure is central: the engineer defines how queries read and modify data, how concurrent transactions become visible, and how durable state is recovered. Systems are validated through deterministic simulation, workload testing, and evidence from production.

The position owns major changes from design through production, coordinates work spanning service components and teams, and mentors engineers in design reviews, debugging, and incident analysis involving concurrency, durability, and recovery. It also participates in the service's on-call rotation and incident response. Available locations are Austin, Texas; Seattle, Washington; and London, United Kingdom.

Requirements

• Experience owning a database, storage engine, transaction system, or similarly correctness-sensitive stateful system from architecture through production.
• Ability to make architecture and implementation decisions when requirements or system boundaries are incomplete.
• Understanding of how query execution, indexing, transaction processing, and durable state shape what developers and operators observe.
• Understanding of how concurrency control, isolation, replication, and snapshots shape consistency, durability, and recovery, including when operations arrive out of order, components fail independently, or networks partition.
• Ability to write and debug concurrent production software in Rust, Go, C++, or another systems language.
• Ability to trace failures across process, network, and durable-state boundaries.
• Experience operating stateful systems through rollouts, scaling events, incidents, and recovery.
• Ability to distinguish transient unavailability from incomplete or incorrect recovery and determine when a system is safe to return to service.
• Experience leading investigations where failures crossed systems owned by several teams.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with the internals of PostgreSQL, MySQL, Amazon Aurora, or another relational database, including tracing a SQL operation from planning through commit.
• Transaction-processing or concurrency-control work involving the definition of snapshot visibility and recovery behavior.
• Experience profiling database workloads and tracing performance bottlenecks from query execution through durable storage.
• Experience using deterministic simulation or another systematic method to uncover distributed-systems bugs missed by conventional tests.

Responsibilities

• Improve query planning and execution, including index selection, row reads and writes, and performance as data volumes and access patterns change.
• Build transaction and storage paths that make writes durable and reads consistent.
• Define when changes become visible, how commits survive failure, and how recovery restores a correct view of the data.
• Design deterministic simulations that make rare event orderings and failures reproducible.
• Plan stateful upgrades that cannot be reversed by rolling back software, and carry them through staged rollout, failover, and recovery without putting existing data at risk.
• Participate in the service's on-call rotation and incident response.
• Own major changes from design through production.
• Coordinate implementation across teams when changes span multiple parts of the service, and help trace failures across those parts.
• Mentor other engineers through design reviews, debugging, and incident analysis involving concurrency, durability, and recovery.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed