Distributed Systems Engineer - Data Platform (Delivery, Database, Retrieval)

Cloudflare's Data Org builds systems that ingest, process, store, and retrieve data across its global network, powering logs, analytics, and alerts. This role focuses on building distributed systems in Go, operating them in production, and working across the data lifecycle from ingestion to customer-facing retrieval. Engineers typically develop depth in either analytical database systems (ClickHouse-based) or data delivery and retrieval (streaming pipelines, public APIs, log delivery, alerting).

• Design, build, and operate reliable distributed systems processing large data volumes.
• 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 (backpressure, retries, idempotency, replication, graceful degradation).
• Define SLOs, monitor production health, plan capacity, respond to incidents.
• Diagnose performance bottlenecks across ingestion, processing, storage, and retrieval.
• Depending on focus: operate ClickHouse clusters, build data delivery pipelines, develop GraphQL APIs and alerting products.
• Collaborate with product and engineering teams; evaluate technologies; participate in on-call rotation.

• 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 (Rust, C++) with ability to become productive in Go quickly.
• Experience building and operating production services (deployment, monitoring, capacity planning, incident response, debugging).
• Solid understanding of distributed-systems concepts (concurrency, consistency, fault tolerance, partitioning, data integrity).
• Experience with high-throughput or low-latency data processing.
• Hands-on experience with observability tools such as Prometheus and Grafana.
• Demonstrated depth in at least one area: database systems (SQL, analytical databases, database internals, query optimization, performance tuning) or data delivery and retrieval (streaming systems, event-driven architectures, data pipelines, API development, customer-facing data integrations).

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

Compensation varies by location. For Portugal: €54,000 - €91,000. For Colorado: $136,000 - $187,000. For Washington: $150,000 - $206,000. Eligible for Cloudflare's equity plan. Benefits include medical/Rx, dental, vision, flexible spending accounts, commuter accounts, fertility and family forming benefits, mental health support, EAP, global travel medical insurance, short and long term disability, life and accident insurance, 401(k) retirement savings plan, employee stock participation plan, flexible paid time off, and leave programs including parental, pregnancy health, medical, and bereavement leave.

Apply via the provided Greenhouse link. Applicants who progress to the offer stage may be asked to attend an in-person interview at a Cloudflare office or hub.