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

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 Atlanta, US Austin, US Denver, US Lisbon, Portugal Seattle, US Washington DC, US Applications will be accepted until November 23, 2026. About the Role Cloudflare’s Data Org builds the systems that ingest, process, store, and retrieve data generated across our global network. These systems power the logs, analytics, and alerts that give customers near real-time visibility into the security, reliability, and performance of their Internet properties. We are looking for systems-oriented backend engineers who enjoy solving distributed-systems problems at large scale. You will build primarily in Go, operate the systems you create, and work across the data lifecycle, from high-throughput ingestion and delivery to analytical storage and customer-facing retrieval. Engineers in this role typically develop depth in one of two areas: Analytical database systems: Building and operating our ClickHouse-based analytical platform, improving database performance, reliability, and scalability. Data delivery and retrieval: Building streaming pipelines, public APIs, log delivery integrations, and alerting systems that make customer data accessible and actionable. We are looking for strong backend and systems fundamentals, production operational experience, and demonstrated depth in at least one of these areas. What You’ll Do Design, build, and operate reliable distributed systems that process very large volumes of data. Develop and optimise 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 through techniques such as backpressure, retries, idempotency, replication, and graceful degradation. Define service-level objectives, monitor production health, plan capacity, and respond to incidents. Diagnose performance bottlenecks across ingestion, processing, storage, and retrieval. Depending on your area of focus: Build and operate large-scale ClickHouse clusters and contribute improvements to the ClickHouse ecosystem. Develop data delivery pipelines that route data from Cloudflare’s global network to customer destinations. Build and scale GraphQL APIs, log delivery integrations, and near real-time alerting products. Collaborate with product and engineering teams to understand their data needs and design pragmatic solutions. Evaluate technologies and contribute to the next generation of Cloudflare’s data platform. Participate in an on-call rotation for the production systems owned by your team. What We’re Looking For 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 the ability to become productive in Go quickly. Experience building and operating production services, including