Senior Systems Engineer (Data Infrastructure)

About Us

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. Internet properties powered by Cloudflare all have web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with every request. As a result, they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. Cloudflare was named to Entrepreneur Magazine’s Top Company Cultures list and ranked among the World’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company. 

At Cloudflare, we’re not looking for people who wait for a polished roadmap; we’re looking for the builders who see the cracks in the Internet that everyone else has simply learned to live with. We value candidates who have the instinct to spot a "normalized" problem and the AI-native curiosity to create a solution using the latest tools. Our culture is built on iteration, leveraging AI to ship faster today to make it better tomorrow, while ensuring that every improvement, no matter how small, is shared across the team to lift everyone up. If you’re the type of person who values curiosity over bureaucracy, and that AI is a partner in solving tough problems to keep the Internet moving forward, you’ll fit right in.

Available Locations: Austin, Denver, Washington DC, Atlanta

About the Team

The Core Data team’s mission is building a centralized data platform for Cloudflare that provides  secure, democratized access to data for internal customers throughout the company. We operate infrastructure and craft tools to empower both technical and non-technical users to answer their most important questions. We facilitate access to data from federated sources across the company for dashboarding, ad-hoc querying and in-product use cases. We power data pipelines and data products, secure and monitor data, and drive data governance at Cloudflare. Our work enables every individual at the company to act with greater information and make more informed decisions. 

About the Role

We are looking for an experienced systems engineer with a deep expertise in data to help us expand, mature and maintain our data infrastructure. You’ll lead technical architecture and implementation to scale our data platform, manage access seamlessly while accounting for privacy and security, create data pipelines and data products, and build tools to automate accessibility and usefulness of data. You’ll work with teams including Product Growth, Marketing and others to help those teams make informed decisions, the Billing team to power usage and invoicing platforms, as well as product teams across the company bringing new and innovative solutions to Cloudflare customers using our internal data.

What You’ll Do

• Define, design and execute strategic technical architecture for highly visible, highly critical data infrastructure at the company.
• Lead the design and development 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.

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
• Background 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

Desirable Skills

• 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

What Makes Cloudflare Special?

We’re not just a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company. We’re a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company with a soul. Fundamental to our mission to help build a better Internet is protecting the free and open Internet.

Project Galileo: Since 2014, we've equipped more than 2,400 journalism and civil society organizations in 111 countries with powerful tools to defend themselves against attacks that would otherwise censor their work, technology already used by Cloudflare’s enterprise customers--at no cost.

Athenian Project: In 2017, we created the Athenian Project to ensure that state and local governments have the highest level of protection and reliability for free, so that their constituents have access to election information and voter registration. Since the project, we've provided services to more than 425 local government election websites in 33 states.

1.1.1.1: We released 1.1.1.1 to help fix the foundation of the Internet by building a faster, more secure and privacy-centric public DNS resolver. This is available publicly for everyone to use - it is the first consumer-focused service Cloudflare has ever released. Here’s the deal - we don’t store client IP addresses never, ever. We will continue to abide by our privacy commitment and ensure that no user data is sold to advertisers or used to target consumers.

Sound like something you’d like to be a part of? We’d love to hear from you!

This position may require access to information protected under U.S. export control laws, including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations. Please note that any offer of employment may be conditioned on your authorization to receive software or technology controlled under these U.S. export laws without sponsorship for an export license.

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.  All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to their, or any other person's, perceived or actual race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, family care status, or any other basis protected by law. We are an AA/Veterans/Disabled Employer.

Cloudflare provides reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities.  Please tell us if you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job. Examples of reasonable accommodations include, but are not limited to, changing the application process, providing documents in an alternate format, using a sign language interpreter, or using specialized equipment.  If you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job, please contact us via e-mail at hr@cloudflare.com or via mail at 101 Townsend St. San Francisco, CA 94107.