Senior Software Engineer - Quicksilver - Distributed Key Value

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: Atlanta, Austin, Denver, NewYork, Seattle, Washington D.C.

About the role

Quicksilver is Cloudflare’s globally distributed key-value store. It replicates our data all around the world, over tens of thousands of servers and over 500 data centers. It handles all kinds of network conditions and serves billions of keys per second. In this role, you can expect to see challenges like unexpected network issues, hardware failures, kernel bugs and still have to deliver the data to the edge in a fast and reliable way. Along with the rest of the team, you will own and support the whole stack: the code base, the unit and integration test, deployment and rollback plans, operations, monitoring, alerting, debugging and on-call. Quicksilver is written in Go and C. If working at this scale excites you and you are intrigued by very tricky bugs, rather than being scared by them, you might be a match for this role.

What you'll do

Work on our distributed large scale key-value store, you will write new features in Go and reviewing pull request

Improve performance, CPU, memory usage, etc.

Improve our monitoring and our tools, all written in Go

Help with debugging and investigating hard to reproduce problems

Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience

You have previous experience writing robust systems, code quality, performance and technical debt. You understand the tradeoffs that doing rigorous engineering requires.

You have proven experience with storage systems, peer to peer systems, large scale distributed systems or simply system programming in general.

You have previous experience of chasing problems through multiple layers of our software stack. You can be flexible and you are very curious.

You are flexible and very autonomous. You won’t be micromanaged in this role and will be looked to have experience thinking out of the box and coming up with simple and smart designs for complex issues.

You have a previous track record of being pragmatic and believe in the value of simple solutions.

You equally enjoy low-level and high-level programming. You have a taste for programming languages.

You enjoy being a part of a team that challenges each other's designs -- you are good at taking and giving constructive criticism with a goal of producing the best solution.

You are not afraid of engaging in outages on anti-social hours.

Compensation

Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.