Distributed Systems Engineer - Data Platform - Analytics and Alerts

At Cloudflare, we are on a mission to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world’s largest networks that powers millions of websites and other Internet properties for customers ranging from individual bloggers to SMBs to Fortune 500 companies. Cloudflare protects and accelerates any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. Internet properties powered by Cloudflare have web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with every request, resulting in significant performance improvements and decreased spam and other attacks. Cloudflare was named to Entrepreneur Magazine’s Top Company Cultures list and ranked among the World’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company.

We’re looking for builders who see the cracks in the Internet that everyone else has simply learned to live with. Our culture values curiosity over bureaucracy, leveraging AI to ship faster and improve continuously, while ensuring every improvement is shared across the team. If you’re the type of person who values AI as a partner in solving tough problems to keep the Internet moving forward, you’ll fit right in.

Available locations: Atlanta, US; Austin, US; Denver, US; Seattle, US; Washington DC, US; Lisbon, Portugal.

About the role

We are looking for experienced and highly motivated engineers to join our Data Org and help build the future of data at Cloudflare. Our organization is responsible for the entire data lifecycle—from ingestion and processing to storage and retrieval—powering the critical logs and analytics that provide customers with real-time visibility into the health and performance of their online properties. Our mission is to empower customers to leverage their data to drive better business outcomes.

We build and maintain a suite of high-performance, scalable systems that handle more than a billion events per second. As an engineer in our organization, you will work on complex distributed systems challenges across different parts of our data stack. Our Data Organization is composed of several key teams:

• Data Delivery / Data Pipeline: This team designs, develops, and operates our distributed data delivery pipeline, a high-throughput, low-latency system primarily written in Go. It ingests, processes, and routes massive volumes of data from Cloudflare’s global network to multiple core destinations.
• Analytical Database Platform: Engineers on this team evolve our core analytical platform powered by ClickHouse, ensuring high performance, scalability, data integrity, and query optimization for Cloudflare’s immense analytical workloads.
• Data Retrieval (Customer-Facing Products): This department focuses on making data accessible and actionable for users, comprising two main groups:
  • Analytics and Alerts: Develops public APIs like the GraphQL Analytics API and builds our alerting platform, enabling near real-time alerts based on critical logs and metrics.
  • Logs and Audit Logs: Builds a robust logging platform for reliable data delivery and seamless integrations with customer destinations, ensuring secure and efficient access to log data.

This role focuses on the Analytics and Alerts group.

Responsibilities

• Develop and enhance our customer-facing APIs, focusing on performance, reliability, and an intuitive user experience.
• Design, build, and maintain our near real-time alerting platform, from data processing and anomaly detection to reliable notification delivery.
• Optimize the performance of complex analytical queries that power our APIs and dashboards, working closely with the database platform team.
• Create intuitive and powerful tools that allow customers to explore their data and configure meaningful alerts based on logs and metrics.
• Scale our API and alerting infrastructure to support a growing number of internal and external use cases.
• Collaborate with front-end engineers and product managers to define API contracts and deliver a seamless data experience for users.
• Ensure the operational health of our APIs and alerting systems by developing comprehensive monitoring and participating in an on-call rotation (with flexibility for outside standard working hours as needed).

Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience in software development covering distributed systems and scalable APIs.
• Strong programming skills (Go is preferable), with a deep understanding of software development best practices for building performant, customer-facing services.
• Hands-on experience with modern observability stacks, including Prometheus, Grafana, and handling high-cardinality metrics at scale.
• Strong knowledge of SQL, including extensive experience with complex query optimization.
• A solid foundation in computer science, including algorithms, data structures, distributed systems, and concurrency.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with a willingness to debug and troubleshoot complex problems at high scale.
• Ability to work collaboratively in a team environment and communicate effectively across Cloudflare.
• Experience developing and scaling APIs, particularly GraphQL, is a strong plus.
• Experience with data streaming technologies (e.g., Kafka, Flink) for real-time processing is a plus.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code tools like SALT or Terraform is a plus.
• Experience with Linux container technologies, such as Docker and Kubernetes, is a plus.

Benefits

Cloudflare offers a complete package of benefits and programs to support you and your family. The below describes benefits for employees in the United States; benefits may vary for employees based outside the U.S.

Health & Welfare 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

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

Equity

This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan.

What Makes Cloudflare Special?

We’re not just a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company—we’re a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company with a soul. Fundamental to our mission is protecting the free and open Internet through initiatives like:

• Project Galileo: Since 2014, we’ve equipped over 2,400 journalism and civil society organizations in 111 countries with tools to defend against attacks that would otherwise censor their work—at no cost.
• Athenian Project: Created in 2017 to ensure state and local governments have the highest level of protection and reliability for free, providing services to over 425 local government election websites in 33 states.
• 1.1.1.1: A faster, more secure, and privacy-centric public DNS resolver available to everyone. We do not store client IP addresses and ensure no user data is sold to advertisers or used to target consumers.