Senior Distributed Systems Engineer - Cache

Available Locations: Atlanta, GA, Austin, TX, Champaign, IL, Denver, CO, New York, NY, San Francisco, CA, Seattle, WA, Washington, DC

About the Department

Cloudflare's Engineering Team builds and runs the software that helps power millions of Internet properties. Product development covers both new features and functionality as well as scaling our existing software to meet the challenges of a massively growing customer base.

The Content Delivery group helps make the Internet faster, safer, and more reliable by building and optimizing one of the world's largest CDNs.

Role Summary

The Cache team builds and operates the high-performance reverse proxy and caching data plane at Cloudflare's edge. Built on Pingora, Cloudflare's open-source Rust framework for fast, reliable network services, this software serves cached content, routes traffic across cache tiers, and connects Cloudflare to customer origins. Its performance, correctness, and resilience directly affect request latency, origin load, and availability across Cloudflare's global network.

You will work primarily on the reverse proxy and the services that support it: backend routing and load balancing, cache storage and indexing, globally distributed purge, Tiered Cache routing, and production observability. These systems are also foundational building blocks for teams across Cloudflare, which use the proxy, caching, routing, and purge capabilities to power their own products. The team carries these capabilities through shared internal interfaces, distributed control planes, and customer-facing products including Cache Rules, Tiered Cache, Cache Reserve, Workers Cache API, and Always Online. Features ship end to end: you will help design, implement, test, roll out, and operate the systems you build.

This is a good fit if you enjoy problems where latency, correctness, and reliability are hard requirements; where changes must be introduced safely across a global fleet; and where improvements can benefit a significant portion of Internet traffic.

Role Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate the high-performance cache and proxy data plane that serves content at Cloudflare's edge and connects to customer origins
• Contribute to Pingora and the production services built on it, improving asynchronous I/O, connection handling, memory and disk efficiency, and tail latency
• Improve cache correctness and performance through object placement, retention, admission and eviction policies, range-request handling, and resilience to corrupt or incomplete data
• Build globally distributed purge and Tiered Cache systems that invalidate content quickly, select efficient cache paths, improve hit rates, and reduce origin load
• Deliver shared platform capabilities and customer-facing APIs and rules for cache keys, TTLs, response handling, purge behavior, and programmatic access from Workers
• Own features end to end: write technical designs, implement services and libraries, add automated tests and observability, drive staged rollouts, and operate the resulting systems in production
• Participate in the team's on-call rotation, lead incident response and post-mortems, and continually improve reliability, capacity, and operational tooling
• Reason carefully about failure modes and blast radius, using traffic cohorts, measurable guardrails, and rollback mechanisms to introduce high-impact changes safely
• Partner with product and engineering teams across Cloudflare that depend on or extend the cache and proxy platform
• Raise the engineering bar through code review, mentorship, clear written communication, and improvements to team standards and tooling

Role Requirements (Must-Have Skills)

• Minimum 4 years of professional experience designing, building, and operating production software systems
• Strong proficiency in at least one systems or backend language such as Rust, Go, C, or C++, with a willingness to work in Rust
• Strong understanding of HTTP semantics and transport protocols such as TCP, TLS, and QUIC
• Experience designing and implementing secure, resilient, high-performance distributed systems
• Experience with Linux systems, networking, concurrency, and performance analysis
• Track record of production ownership, including monitoring, debugging, on-call, incident response, and ongoing reliability improvements
• Experience using metrics, logs, traces, profiling, and experiments to understand production behavior and validate improvements
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to write clear technical designs and lead projects across team boundaries
• Willingness to use AI-assisted engineering tools to accelerate development and investigation while remaining accountable for correctness, security, and design quality

Nice-to-Have Skills

• Professional experience with Rust or high-performance asynchronous systems
• Experience with caches, HTTP proxies, CDNs, distributed storage, or latency-sensitive data-plane services
• Experience analyzing memory use, disk I/O, resource contention, and tail latency in production systems
• Experience building APIs or distributed control planes using event streaming, relational databases, or analytical data systems
• Familiarity with Kubernetes, Kafka, PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, or similar infrastructure
• Experience contributing to open-source software or leading multi-team engineering programs

Compensation

Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location and level.

San Francisco Estimated Base salary $194,000 - $266,000.

Seattle, Washington D.C., New York Estimated Base salary $185,000 - $254,000.

Denver, Austin, Illinois, Atlanta Estimated Base salary $168,000 - $231,000.

Equity

This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan.