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Cloudflare is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to work on distributed databases within its Developer Platform, which powers stateful, data-intensive applications across a global network. The role focuses on the full database stack—from query planning and execution through transaction processing to durable storage.
You will make architectural and implementation decisions that directly shape the consistency, durability, and latency guarantees that customer applications depend on. Correctness under concurrency and failure is central to this work. You will define and implement how queries read and modify data, how concurrent transactions become visible, how durable state is recovered, and validate these systems using deterministic simulation, workload testing, and production evidence.
Key responsibilities include:
- Improve query planning and execution, including index selection, row reads and writes, and performance optimization as data volumes and access patterns change
- Build transaction and storage paths that ensure writes are durable and reads are consistent; define visibility semantics, commit durability, and recovery behavior
- Design deterministic simulations to make rare event orderings and failures reproducible
- Plan stateful upgrades that cannot be reversed by rollback, executing them through staged rollout, failover, and recovery without risking existing data
- Participate in on-call rotation and incident response
- Own major changes from design through production; coordinate implementation across teams when changes span multiple service components
- Mentor other engineers through design reviews, debugging, and incident analysis involving concurrency, durability, and recovery
Desirable qualifications and experience:
- Ownership of a database, storage engine, transaction system, or similarly correctness-sensitive stateful system from architecture through production; ability to make architecture and implementation decisions with incomplete requirements or system boundaries
- Deep understanding of how query execution, indexing, transaction processing, and durable state shape developer and operator experience
- Understanding of concurrency control, isolation, replication, and snapshots; ability to apply these concepts when operations arrive out of order, components fail independently, or the network partitions
- Production experience writing and debugging concurrent software in Rust, Go, C++, or similar systems languages; ability to trace failures across process, network, and durable-state boundaries
- Experience operating stateful systems through rollouts, scaling events, incidents, and recovery; clear understanding of transient unavailability versus incomplete or incorrect recovery
- Leadership of cross-team investigations where failures spanned systems owned by multiple teams
Bonus experience includes:
- Work on internals of PostgreSQL, MySQL, Amazon Aurora, or similar relational databases; ability to trace SQL operations from planning through commit
- Contributions to transaction processing or concurrency control, including defining snapshot visibility and recovery behavior
- Database workload profiling and performance bottleneck tracing from query execution through durable storage
- Use of deterministic simulation or systematic methods to uncover distributed-systems bugs that conventional tests miss
