Senior Software Engineer, Distributed Databases

About Us

Available Locations: Austin, TX | New York, NY | San Francisco, CA | Seattle, WA | London, UK or Germany

About the Role

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 define and implement how queries read and modify data, how concurrent transactions become visible, and how durable state is recovered. 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. 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 when a change spans multiple parts of the service, and help trace failures across those parts.
• Mentor other engineers through design reviews, debugging, and incident analysis involving concurrency, durability, and recovery.

Desirable Skills, Knowledge & Experience

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

Bonus Points

• You've worked on the internals of PostgreSQL, MySQL, Amazon Aurora, or another relational database and can trace a SQL operation from planning through commit.
• Your work on transaction processing or concurrency control has included defining snapshot visibility and recovery behavior.
• You've profiled database workloads and traced performance bottlenecks from query execution through durable storage.
• You've used deterministic simulation or another systematic method to uncover distributed-systems bugs that conventional tests missed.

Compensation

Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.

• For Bay Area based hires: Estimated annual salary of $194,000 - $266,000
• For New York City, New Jersey, Washington, Washington DC, and California (excluding Bay Area) based hires: Estimated annual salary of $185,000 - $254,000
• For Germany based hires: Estimated annual salary is between €102,000 - €140,000.

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