Senior Systems Engineer, AI Gateway

About the role

AI inference is becoming core infrastructure. Every serious application will need access to many models, across many providers, with reliability, observability, security, cost control, and routing built in from the start. AI Gateway is Cloudflare’s bet that this layer should exist at the network edge: close to users, close to compute, and simple enough that a developer can adopt it with one API change. We are looking for a Senior Systems Engineer to help build that layer.

• Build core AI Gateway systems that handle high-volume inference traffic across providers, models, and Cloudflare’s global network.
• Design and implement APIs, routing primitives, observability features, controls, and developer workflows that make AI Gateway reliable and easy to adopt.
• Work across product and infrastructure boundaries with Workers AI, Agents, and the broader Developer Platform organization to make Cloudflare’s AI platform feel like one coherent product.
• Turn ambiguous product and technical ideas into prototypes, design docs, shipped features, and measurable production improvements.
• Improve reliability, performance, cost efficiency, and debuggability for latency-sensitive AI workloads.
• Build the software — and the software that builds the software: agents, tests, harnesses, evaluation loops, operational tools, and internal context that help the team move faster with confidence.
• Sweat the developer experience. Error messages, SDKs, dashboard flows, docs, examples, and API details all matter.
• Mentor other engineers through design review, code review, debugging, and technical leadership without needing people-management authority.
• Bring strong opinions, clear judgment, and a willingness to revise your view when data, users, or production reality prove otherwise.

Desirable Skills, Knowledge & Experience

• 5+ years of experience building and operating production systems, ideally in AI infrastructure, developer platforms, cloud infrastructure, edge/proxy systems, high-scale APIs, or distributed systems.
• Strong systems engineering fundamentals: networking, APIs, reliability, observability, data modeling, performance, and operational tradeoffs.
• Experience designing or scaling distributed systems where latency, throughput, availability, and correctness all matter.
• Ability to work comfortably across the stack, from API design and product surfaces to backend services, queues, storage systems, control planes, or performance-critical code.
• Strong developer tools taste. You have used and built enough APIs, SDKs, dashboards, CLIs, docs, and internal platforms to know what makes them delightful or painful.
• Clear technical communication: you can write design docs, explain tradeoffs, review architecture, and align engineers and product partners around a practical path forward.
• Builder’s bias toward working software. You can prototype quickly, ship incrementally, and improve systems while they are already in production.
• Operational judgment. You understand that at Cloudflare scale, rare bugs are not rare for long, and you build systems that are observable, resilient, and recoverable.
• Comfort using AI-native development workflows and curiosity about how agents, tools, and automation can improve engineering productivity.

Bonus Points

• Experience building AI/ML infrastructure, inference platforms, model gateways, LLM-powered applications, or provider abstraction layers.
• Experience building developer-facing APIs, SDKs, CLIs, dashboards, or platform products at scale.
• Hands-on experience with proxy, edge, gateway, routing, or traffic management systems.
• Familiarity with the current AI ecosystem: model providers, model capabilities, agent frameworks, inference patterns, and the rough edges developers hit in practice.
• Experience with cost controls, rate limits, caching, retries, fallbacks, evaluation, or observability for AI workloads.
• Experience with TypeScript, Go, Rust, or similar systems/backend languages.
• You have built or heavily customized your own agentic development environment: custom agents, harnesses, tools, or workflows that changed how you ship.
• You have built something with AI Gateway, Workers AI, or a competing product, and have opinions about what is missing.

Compensation

Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location. For Bay Area based hires: Estimated annual salary of $194,000-266,000 Equity This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan.

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 an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunity for all people and place great value in both diversity and inclusiveness. All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to, among other things, race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, family care status, or any other basis protected by law.