Principal Software Engineer: Distributed Systems (Config, Test, & Deployment)

About the role

The Intent Management organization within Cloudflare’s Foundational Engineering team is seeking a Technical Coherence Lead to own the technical coherence of a platform that spans globally distributed key-value storage, progressive release and configuration delivery, and the testing and health-mediation systems that prove change is safe. Reporting directly to the Senior Director, this role will work alongside engineers who have presented at various conferences and will help deliver on key Health Mediated Deployment projects.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical coherence of a platform that spans globally distributed key-value storage, progressive release and configuration delivery, and the testing and health-mediation systems that prove change is safe.
• Translate what Cloudflare’s Edge and control-plane platforms need into the primitives our teams build.
• Move fluidly between writing production code, designing new systems, and reviewing the proposals of other senior engineers.
• Help integrate LLMs into our processes and systems.
• Work on the key Health Mediated Deployment projects that are being tracked through senior leadership of Cloudflare up to the founders.

Requirements

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with a demonstrated history of leading complex, organization-wide technical initiatives that delivered measurable improvements to system performance, reliability, security, developer productivity, or engineering culture.
• Strong track record of technical leadership and influence without direct authority, including driving consensus on technical decisions across multiple teams, mentoring senior engineers, and establishing architectural patterns that are widely adopted across an organization.
• Expertise in at least one modern strongly-typed programming language.
• Experience designing, building and managing high volume, global scale software applications.
• Experience with API design standards, patterns and best practices.
• Experience working with top tier LLMs to plan, write, test, and deploy software.

Desirable Skills, Knowledge and Experience

• Strong interpersonal and communication skills with a bias towards action.
• Experience with scaling and simplifying high scale Configuration Management systems.
• Familiarity with Google’s Prodspec and Annealing systems.
• Experience with Kubernetes.
• Experience with RocksDB or similar data stores.
• Experience with health checking and probe platforms at significant scale.
• Public evidence of technical leadership such as conference talks on distributed systems or security, widely-read technical blog posts, significant open source contributions, or published architectural patterns that have been adopted by the broader engineering community.

Pay

Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location. For Bay Area based hires: Estimated annual salary of $230,000 - $288,000
For Washington and New York City based hired: Estimated annual salary of $220,000 - $275,000
For Austin based hired: Estimated annual salary of $200,000 - $250,000

Benefits

Cloudflare offers a complete package of benefits and programs to support you and your family. Our benefits programs can help you pay health care expenses, support caregiving, build capital for the future and make life a little easier and fun!

What Makes Cloudflare Special?

• We are committed to protecting the free and open Internet.
• We provide reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities.