Full-Time

Senior Distributed Systems Engineer

Data Localization

Updated on 9/10/2026

Cloudflare

Cloudflare

5,001-10,000 employees

CDN, cybersecurity, and serverless computing platform

No salary listed

Company Historically Provides H1B Sponsorship

Austin, TX, USA

In Person

An in-person interview may be required at a Cloudflare office or hub at the offer stage.

Category
Software Engineering (1)
Required Skills
gRPC
Kubernetes
Rust
Incident Response
Distributed Systems
Postgres
RDBMS
ClickHouse
Go
Cryptography
Observability
REST APIs
C/C++

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Requirements
  • At least 5 years of professional experience designing, building, and operating production distributed systems at scale.
  • Strong proficiency in at least one systems or backend language such as Go, Rust, or C/C++, with willingness to work in other languages as required by the codebase.
  • A solid grasp of distributed-systems fundamentals, including consistency and consensus models; replication, sharding, and partitioning strategies; partial failures, network partitions, split brain, and clock skew; idempotency, retries, backpressure, timeouts, circuit breakers, and rate limiting; health checking, failure detection, leader election, and graceful degradation; and observability through metrics, logs, and tracing.
  • Practical experience with API design using REST or gRPC, relational databases, and asynchronous messaging or event-streaming systems, including understanding of transactional and consistency boundaries.
  • Comfort with AI-assisted development tooling and judgment to use it while remaining accountable for correctness, security, and design quality.
  • A track record of production ownership, including on-call, incident response, post-mortems, and continuous investment in reliability and performance.
  • Strong written and verbal communication skills, the ability to write clear design documents, and the ability to collaborate effectively across time zones.
Responsibilities
  • Design, build, and operate backend services that enforce regional boundaries on where customer data is stored, processed, and decrypted across a globally distributed edge network.
  • Contribute to end-to-end feature delivery by writing technical designs and RFCs, implementing services and libraries, adding tests and observability, driving rollout, and owning resulting systems in production.
  • Partner with engineers on adjacent platforms, cryptography, networking, data, and product teams to integrate residency guarantees into new and existing surfaces without regressing performance or reliability for other customers.
  • Reason about failure modes, consistency, and blast radius; design systems that fail closed for compliance while degrading gracefully for availability; and make these tradeoffs explicit in design documents.
  • Participate in on-call for services, lead incident response and post-mortems, and invest in reliability, capacity planning, and cost.
  • Raise the engineering bar through code review and mentorship, and contribute to the team’s engineering standards and tooling.
Desired Qualifications
  • Experience building compliance-driven, security-sensitive, or multi-region systems.
  • Familiarity with cryptography basics, including envelope encryption, key management, hardware security modules, or public key infrastructure.
  • Exposure to edge, content delivery network, or Layer 4/Layer 7 proxy platforms, or to large-scale globally distributed storage or key-value systems.
  • Experience contributing to or driving multi-team, multi-quarter engineering programs with cross-functional dependencies across platform, security, and product teams.

Preparing a concise company summary based on the provided Cloudflare description.

Company Size

5,001-10,000

Company Stage

IPO

Headquarters

San Francisco, California

Founded

2009

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Simplify Jobs

Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • September 3, 2026 OpenAI Daybreak partnership adds AI vulnerability remediation to Managed Defense.
  • August 2026 FedRAMP High plus 100-plus agencies widens federal upsell routes.
  • Q2 2026 revenue hit $696.1 million, and full-year guidance rose to $2.870 billion.

What critics are saying

  • May 7, 2026 layoffs of 1,100 signal AI restructuring after margin pressure and soft guidance.
  • OpenAI and Cursor partnerships commoditize Cloudflare unless customers pay for higher-margin security.
  • A major breach or AI-bypass incident could collapse trust in Cloudflare’s edge defenses.

What makes Cloudflare unique

  • Cloudflare’s edge network spans millions of web assets and trillions of daily requests.
  • FedRAMP High, won August 11, 2026, opens sensitive U.S. government workloads.
  • September 2, 2026 Cursor Sandboxes deepens Cloudflare’s role as the agent execution layer.

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Benefits

Competitive salaries

Take-what-you-need paid vacation policy

Comprehensive health plans and benefits

Paid maternity and paternity leave

Commuter and ride share options

Returnships

Growth & Insights and Company News

Headcount

6 month growth

-5%

1 year growth

-5%

2 year growth

-5%
Yahoo Finance
Sep 5th, 2026
OpenAI commits $1B to cyber defence, backs Cloudflare and SentinelOne AI security services

OpenAI launched Daybreak for Frontline Defenders on 3 September, committing $1 billion in subsidized access, training, and partnerships. The Daybreak Defense Network now includes over 35 enterprise products and services. Cloudflare is offering invitation-only access to an AI vulnerability-discovery and remediation service built with GPT-5.6 Cyber. SentinelOne is adding Daybreak models to its Wayfinder services. Both companies take different approaches to the same programme. Cloudflare's model starts at the network and developer edge, combining source-code analysis with traffic and security context. SentinelOne approaches from endpoint and security operations, placing AI inside workflows for security teams. Eighty-seven hedge funds held Cloudflare at 30 June, versus 84 at 31 March. Forty-one held SentinelOne in Q2, up from 37 in Q1.

Yahoo Finance
Sep 3rd, 2026
Cloudflare partners with OpenAI to launch AI-powered vulnerability detection and remediation service

Cloudflare has launched Vulnerability Discovery and Remediation, a service using OpenAI's Daybreak models to identify, block, and fix software vulnerabilities. Available through Cloudflare Managed Defense, the service combines deep code analysis and automated patch generation with real-time traffic data from Cloudflare's global network. The initiative addresses a growing problem: by September 2026, the National Vulnerability Database had logged 60,475 vulnerabilities, surpassing 2025's total of 48,185. Traditional scanners often surface thousands of findings without production context to prioritise threats. Cloudflare's network processes trillions of daily requests across millions of web assets. By integrating OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Cyber model, the service can detect emerging weaknesses and neutralise zero-day exploits before they spread. "We're shifting the defence strategy away from chasing patches one vulnerability at a time to an automated approach," said Matthew Prince, Cloudflare's co-founder and CEO.

Creative Bloq
Sep 3rd, 2026
ArtStation is taking action against AI art, but there's one question it doesn't want to answer.

ArtStation is taking action against AI art, but there's one question it doesn't want to answer. Published 5 hours ago Some artists think there's an easier solution. When ArtStation, one of the most popular digital art communities online, recently changed hands, many long-time users of the platform had one big hope: that the new owner would finally take action to stem the swell of AI-generated content on the platform. They now have some good news. KitBash has turned on 'NoAI' by default for all uploads, marking them as unavailable for AI training. Meanwhile, work is underway to try to make it harder for bots to scrape the site and to stop 'AI art' from burying human artists' work. But some artists are wondering, isn't there an easier potential solution for this? Last month, Epic Games, the developer of Fortnite and the game development software Unreal Engine, sold ArtStation to KitBash, the company behind the 3D assets platforms KitBash3D and Greyscalegorilla. Latest Videos FromCreative Bloq The best logos of the 1980s Bold, vibrant designs make the best logos of the 1980s iconic, from corporate brands to classic movies. The new owner says it's been listening to users and read the message about AI clear. Artists want measures to protect their work and to stop it from being buried under the deluge of AI slop. Regarding the first issue, as of yesterday, the default setting for all work on the platform is 'no AI'. This means that both new and existing uploads are automatically excluded from AI training. Users can turn the setting off if, for some reason, they want their work to be available for AI training. This opt-in rather than opt-out approach is something many artists had called for. It contrasts with the approaches of many other platforms. Users on some social platforms like Instagram have to navigate settings to find how to prevent their content from being used for AI, if it's even possible in their region. 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ArtStation has recognised that the existing #CreatedWithAI label and filtering tools aren't enough to solve the problem. It says it's working on the development of tools to allow better discovery, more control, and better ways to keep generated content from drowning out professional work. "AI-assisted workflows are varied, so one simple rule won't solve discovery. But complexity cannot become an excuse for inaction," it said on the ArtStation blog, adding: "We don't have every answer yet. We want to get this right, and we want the community involved as we work through it". Many artists have welcomed the policy shift towards favouring human art over AI. But some have a question that ArtStation doesn't seem to want to answer. Why not just ban AI art from the platform? "Feels like [trying to] have it both ways," one artist responded to the announcement on X. "Would love to know why you guys are choosing to allow AI content on the platform. Is it for numbers? Subscriptions? Banning AI would solve the Human artist discovery issue and have less logistics on your side. So why?" ArtStation responded to the question, but it didn't answer it: "We hear you, and we agree that the current tools are not enough to keep AI-generated content from burying human work. ArtStation is now part of the KitBash family, and we are working through how to handle complex workflows without hurting artists. Better discovery controls are just the beginning of the changes we want to make to put creators first." What is ArtStation? ArtStation is an online platform and community where digital artists can showcase their work. Many of the digital artists who have contributed to Creative Bloq use it as a channel to share their work or as their main portfolio. It's also one of the best art inspiration sites, allowing new artists to learn, while agencies, film and game developers and other potential recruiters can find artists for their projects. The platform was founded in 2014 by Leonard Teo and Kevin Strike and quickly grew to have millions of users. It was bought by Epic Games in 2021. Along with Sketchfab, it's now part of KitBash. The new owner intends to add integration with KitBash3D and Greyscalegorilla to create an expanded ecosystem. Freelance journalist and editor Joe is a regular freelance journalist and editor at Creative Bloq. He writes news, features and buying guides and keeps track of the best equipment and software for creatives, from video editing programs to monitors and accessories. A veteran news writer and photographer, he now works as a project manager at the London and Buenos Aires-based design, production and branding agency Hermana Creatives. There he manages a team of designers, photographers and video editors who specialise in producing visual content and design assets for the hospitality sector. He also dances Argentine tango.

IT Digest
Sep 3rd, 2026
Cloudflare expands support for AI coding agents via Cursor integration.

Cloudflare expands support for AI coding agents via Cursor integration. Cloudflare, Inc., the leading connectivity cloud company, has announced official support for running Cursor Cloud Agents on Cloudflare Sandboxes, providing developers and platform engineering teams with a secure, customer-controlled environment to execute autonomous AI coding workflows. Building on existing integrations with platforms such as Devin Outposts and Claude Managed Agents, this integration addresses growing enterprise demands to maintain strict control over where code, build caches, and sensitive credentials reside without disrupting established developer workflows. Under this model, Cursor continues to oversee inference, planning, and agent orchestration, while tool calls including terminal operations, filesystem modifications, and browser tasks execute isolated within the customer's Cloudflare sandbox infrastructure via outbound HTTPS connections. Highlighting the strategic push toward unified execution infrastructure, Dane Knecht, Chief Technology Officer at Cloudflare, stated: "Developers want powerful AI tools that fit naturally into their workflows, and enterprises need those tools to run in environments they control. Cloudflare Sandboxes gives teams the freedom to use the AI tools they prefer while giving organizations a secure, isolated place to run agent work. Bringing Cursor Cloud Agents to Cloudflare Sandboxes is another step toward making Cloudflare the execution layer for the next generation of agentic applications." Reaffirming the collaborative value for distributed development teams, Toni Adams, Sr Director of Partnerships at SpaceXAI, added: "SpaceXAI's goal is to make agents useful wherever developers work. Self-Hosted Machines let teams keep Cursor workflows across desktop, web, and mobile while routing work to infrastructure they operate. Cloudflare Sandboxes give those teams an enterprise-grade option for running agent workloads in a controlled environment." Ultimately, this solution enables organizations to deploy scalable worker pools dynamically, reinforcing Cloudflare's position as a foundational execution layer for platform-native agentic software.

Yahoo Finance
Sep 2nd, 2026
Cloudflare adds Cursor Cloud Agents support to Sandboxes for secure AI coding environments

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