Senior Software Engineer, Distributed Databases

Cloudflare's Developer Platform powers stateful, data-intensive applications across our network. We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer to work across the database stack, from query planning and execution to transaction processing and durable storage. You'll make decisions that shape the consistency, durability, and latency guarantees that customer applications rely on. Correctness under concurrency and failure is central to the role. You'll validate these systems using deterministic simulation, workload testing, and evidence from production.

Responsibilities

Improve query planning and execution, including index selection, row reads and writes, and performance as data volumes and access patterns change; Build transaction and storage paths that make writes durable and reads consistent, define when changes become visible, how commits survive failure, and how recovery restores a correct view of the data; Design deterministic simulations that make rare event orderings and failures reproducible; Plan stateful upgrades that cannot be reversed by rolling back software, and carry them through staged rollout, failover, and recovery without putting existing data at risk; Participate in the service's on-call rotation and incident response; Own major changes from design through production, coordinate implementation across teams, and help trace failures across parts of the service; Mentor other engineers through design reviews, debugging, and incident analysis involving concurrency, durability, and recovery

Requirements

Owned a database, storage engine, transaction system, or similarly correctness-sensitive stateful system from architecture through production; Can make architecture and implementation decisions when requirements or system boundaries are incomplete; Understands how query execution, indexing, transaction processing, and durable state shape what developers and operators observe; Understands how concurrency control, isolation, replication, and snapshots shape consistency, durability, and recovery; Can apply those concepts when operations arrive out of order, components fail independently, or the network partitions; Writes and debugs concurrent production software in Rust, Go, C++, or another systems language; Can trace failures across process, network, and durable-state boundaries; Has operated stateful systems through rollouts, scaling events, incidents, and recovery; Knows the difference between transient unavailability and incomplete or incorrect recovery, and when a system is safe to return to service; Has led investigations where failures crossed systems owned by several teams

Nice to have

Worked on the internals of PostgreSQL, MySQL, Amazon Aurora, or another relational database and can trace a SQL operation from planning through commit; Work on transaction processing or concurrency control has included defining snapshot visibility and recovery behavior; Profiled database workloads and traced performance bottlenecks from query execution through durable storage; Used deterministic simulation or another systematic method to uncover distributed-systems bugs that conventional tests missed

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; Short and Long Term Disability Insurance; Life & Accident Insurance; 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan; Employee Stock Participation Plan; Flexible paid time off covering vacation and sick leave; Leave programs, including parental, pregnancy health, medical, and bereavement leave; Equity participation eligibility