Senior Systems Engineer, Basin Pipelines
Design and build foundational data infrastructure for Cloudflare’s next-generation storage and streaming products, coding core components in Rust, C++, or JavaScript/TypeScript to power global-scale services.
- Compensation
- $185K–$254K / yr
- Location
- In-Office
- Work setup
- Onsite
- Seniority
- Senior
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- Not specified
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Nice to have
- Minimum 5+ years of experience designing, building, and deploying the internals of large-scale distributed systems or storage engines from scratch.
- Direct experience writing core components of a storage or streaming system.
- Proven track record of debugging, profiling, and fixing complex race conditions, split-brain scenarios, and network partition failures at the infrastructure layer.
- Deep, expert-level proficiency in Rust or C++ applied to systems programming.
- Experience building time-series databases, log-structured merge-trees, or real-time stream processing engines from the ground up.
- Academic or professional contributions to distributed systems research (e.g., consensus, conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs), or database theory).
Full description
About Us
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 all have web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with every request. As a result, they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in 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.
At Cloudflare, we’re not looking for people who wait for a polished roadmap; we’re looking for the builders who see the cracks in the Internet that everyone else has simply learned to live with. We value candidates who have the instinct to spot a "normalized" problem and the AI-native curiosity to create a solution using the latest tools. Our culture is built on iteration, leveraging AI to ship faster today to make it better tomorrow, while ensuring that every improvement, no matter how small, is shared across the team to lift everyone up. If you’re the type of person who values curiosity over bureaucracy, and that AI is a partner in solving tough problems to keep the Internet moving forward, you’ll fit right in.
Available Locations | Austin, TX | New York, NY | San Francisco, CA | Seattle, WA or London, UK
About the Department
Emerging Technologies & Incubation (ETI) is where new and bold products are built and released within Cloudflare. Rather than being constrained by the structures which make Cloudflare a massively successful business, we are able to leverage them to deliver entirely new tools and products to our customers. Cloudflare’s edge and network make it possible to solve problems at massive scale and efficiency which would be impossible for almost any other organization.
About the project
Cloudflare Basin became generally available during Birthday Week 2026. We are looking to extend engineering teams working on Basin Pipelines:
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Basin Pipelines ingests, transforms, and loads streaming data into Apache Iceberg or Parquet in R2
Is this role a fit for you?
We are looking for engineers who build infrastructure software from scratch, not those who operate it. If your core expertise is configuring, managing, scaling, or writing applications on top of existing data platforms like Kafka, Flink, Spark, Databricks, or Snowflake, this role is not the right fit. We are seeking the engineers who can write the code that replaces these tools.