Help shape Cloudflare’s distributed database stack, spanning query planning and execution, transaction processing, and durable storage.

Improve query planning and execution, including index selection, row reads and writes, and performance as data volumes and access patterns shift.
Build transaction and storage paths that support durable writes and consistent reads, including:
- Defining when changes become visible
- Ensuring commits survive failure
- Designing recovery to restore a correct view of the data
Design deterministic simulations to reproduce rare event orderings and failures.
Plan and deliver stateful upgrades that cannot be reversed by rolling back software, including staged rollout, failover, and recovery without risking existing data.
Participate in on-call rotation and incident response.
Own major changes from design through production and coordinate across teams when changes span multiple parts of the service, including helping trace failures across those parts.
Mentor engineers through design reviews, debugging, and incident analysis focused on concurrency, durability, and recovery.

Owned a database, storage engine, transaction system, or similarly correctness-sensitive stateful system end-to-end (architecture through production), with ability to make architecture and implementation decisions even when requirements or system boundaries are incomplete.
Understand how query execution, indexing, transaction processing, and durable state shape what developers and operators observe.
Understand how concurrency control, isolation, replication, and snapshots impact consistency, durability, and recovery, including applying these concepts for out-of-order operations, independent component failures, and network partitions.
Write and debug concurrent production software in Rust, Go, C++, or another systems language, including tracing failures across process, network, and durable-state boundaries.
Operate stateful systems through rollouts, scaling, incidents, and recovery, including distinguishing transient unavailability from incomplete or incorrect recovery and determining when it is safe to return to service.
Led investigations where failures spanned systems owned by multiple teams.

Worked on relational database internals (for example, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Amazon Aurora) and can trace a SQL operation from planning through commit.
Transaction processing or concurrency control work that includes 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 approach to uncover distributed-systems bugs missed by conventional testing.

In-person interview: Applicants who progress to the offer stage may be asked to attend an in-person interview at a Cloudflare Office or Cloudflare Hub.
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). Employment offers may be conditioned on authorization to receive controlled software or technology without sponsorship for an export license.
Equal opportunity employer / accommodations: Cloudflare is an equal opportunity employer and AA/Veterans/Disabled Employer. Reasonable accommodations are available for qualified individuals with disabilities; applicants should request accommodations when applying.

Location: Seattle, WA (onsite)

Senior Software Engineer, Distributed Databases

Job Description