Senior Software Engineer, Distributed Databases

Build and harden Cloudflare’s distributed database stack for customer-facing correctness, durability, and performance. This onsite Senior Software Engineer role focuses on turning query planning into efficient execution, designing transaction and durable storage paths, and ensuring the system behaves correctly under concurrency, rare failures, and real-world recovery scenarios. You will help shape the consistency and latency guarantees that developers and operators depend on.

What you’ll work on

• Improve query planning and execution, including index selection plus row reads and writes, adapting performance as data volumes and access patterns evolve.
• Build transaction and storage paths that make writes durable and reads consistent, including defining when updates become visible and how commits survive failure.
• Design and validate recovery behavior so recovery restores a correct view of the data.
• Create deterministic simulations to reproduce rare event orderings and failures.
• Plan stateful upgrades that cannot be reversed by rolling back software, then carry those upgrades through staged rollout, failover, and recovery without risking existing data.
• Participate in on-call and incident response.
• Own major changes from design through production, coordinating across teams when a change spans multiple parts of the service and helping trace failures across those boundaries.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews, debugging, and incident analysis focused on concurrency, durability, and recovery.

What you bring

• Experience owning a database, storage engine, transaction system, or similarly correctness-sensitive stateful system from architecture through production, with the ability to make architecture and implementation decisions when boundaries are incomplete.
• Deep understanding of how query execution, indexing, transaction processing, and durable state influence what developers and operators observe.
• Strong grasp of concurrency control, isolation, replication, and snapshots, and the ability to apply these concepts to out-of-order operations, independent component failures, and network partitions.
• Ability to write and debug concurrent production software in Rust, Go, C++, or another systems language, including tracing failures across process, network, and durable-state boundaries.
• Experience operating stateful systems through rollouts, scaling events, incidents, and recovery, including knowing when recovery is incorrect versus transient unavailability and when it is safe to return to service.
• Proven ability to lead cross-system investigations where failures involved multiple teams.

Technologies

• Rust
• Go
• C++

Bonus points

• Experience with database internals such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, Amazon Aurora, or another relational database, including tracing a SQL operation from planning through commit.
• Transaction processing or concurrency control work that defined snapshot visibility and recovery behavior.
• Profiling database workloads and tracing performance bottlenecks from query execution through durable storage.
• Use of deterministic simulation or another systematic method to uncover distributed-systems bugs missed by conventional testing.

Interview process and location

Location: Seattle, WA (onsite).

In-person interview: Applicants who progress to the offer stage may be asked to attend an in-person interview within one of the Cloudflare Offices or Cloudflare Hubs.

Equal opportunity and accommodations

Cloudflare is an equal opportunity employer and AA/Veterans/Disabled Employer. Cloudflare provides reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities. Tell us if you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job.

U.S. export control laws

This position may require access to information protected under U.S. export control laws, including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations. Any offer of employment may be conditioned on your authorization to receive software or technology controlled under these U.S. export laws without sponsorship for an export license.