The role
From Cloudflare's own posting.
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, US; Seattle, US or London, UK
About the Role
Emerging Technologies & Incubation (ETI) builds and launches new products on Cloudflare’s global network. Within ETI, you’ll join the Storage Infrastructure team to build and operate a shared storage platform for the teams behind stateful products such as R2, Workers KV, and Durable Objects.
We manage the underlying storage hardware, distributed databases, and object storage clusters, including fleet lifecycle automation, capacity, hardware validation, failure-domain planning, observability, and production operations. In this role, you will build platform software and automation that makes these fleet operations safe, repeatable, and scalable.
Responsibilities
Design and build automation and operator tooling for provisioning, configuring, expanding, upgrading, and decommissioning storage hardware, distributed databases, and object storage clusters.
Engineer globally distributed storage fleets to tolerate hardware failures, network disruption, capacity pressure, and recovery events across multiple failure domains.
Develop observability, alerting, and safety controls that help engineers understand fleet health and make auditable production changes.
Diagnose incidents across Linux, storage, networking, and distributed systems; participate in on-call and implement durable fixes that reduce operational toil.
Use AI tools throughout development and operations to accelerate debugging, incident triage, root-cause analysis, and toil reduction, while applying sound engineering judgment and verifying outputs before taking production action.
Validate new storage hardware and characterize its performance during normal operation, failures, rebuilds, and other recovery conditions.
Partner with R2, Workers KV, Durable Objects, Network, Capacity Planning, Performance Engineering, and Infrastructure Operations to turn service requirements into infrastructure capabilities.
Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience
Experience designing, building, and operating infrastructure platforms or large-scale production fleets, including automation of lifecycle operations.
Strong Linux systems knowledge and experience troubleshooting across compute, storage, and networking layers.
Experience operating distributed systems in production, including observability, incident response, reliability improvements, and safe change management.
Ability to write maintainable software in at least one programming language, such as Go, Rust, or Python.
Strong written and verbal communication skills, with experience collaborating across engineering teams and technical stakeholders.
Bonus Points
Experience operating distributed databases or object storage systems, with knowledge of storage fundamentals such as filesystems, SSD behavior, replication, and rebuild dynamics.
Experience with bare-metal provisioning, hardware lifecycle management, or storage hardware validation.
Experience with infrastructure-as-code, configuration-management, or observability systems such as Terraform, SaltStack, Prometheus, or Grafana.
Experience with capacity modeling, workload placement, failure-domain planning, or cross-datacenter networking.
Compensation
Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.
For New York City, New Jersey, Washington, Washington DC, and California (excluding Bay Area) based hires: Estimated annual salary of $185,000 - $254,000
Equity
This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan.
Benefits
Cloudflare offers a complete package of benefits and programs to support you and your family. Our benefits programs can help you pay health care expenses, support caregiving, build capital for the future and make life a little easier and fun! The below is a description of our benefits for employees in the United States, and benefits may vary for employees based outside the U.S.
Health & Welfare Benefits
Medical/Rx Insurance
Dental Insurance
Vision Insurance
Flexible Spending Accounts
Commuter Spending Accounts
Fertility & Family Forming Benefits
On-demand mental health support and Employee Assistance Program
Global Travel Medical Insurance
Financial Benefits
Short and Long Term Disability Insurance
Life & Accident Insurance
401(k) Retirement Savings Plan
Employee Stock Participation Plan
Time Off
Flexible paid time off covering vacation and sick leave
Leave programs, including parental, pregnancy health, medical, and bereavement leave
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!
Please note that applicants who progress to the offer stage of the interview process may be asked to attend an in-person interview within one of the Cloudflare Offices or Cloudflare Hubs. More details about this will be available at that stage of the interview process.
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 techn