Systems Engineer, R2 Gateway

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 (Hybrid)

About the Role

R2 is Cloudflare's object storage platform, offering developers durable, reliable storage with zero egress fees that integrates seamlessly with Cloudflare's global network and Developer Platform. The R2 Gateway team owns the request-facing layer of R2 — the S3-compatible API gateway that every object put, get, list, and delete flows through. When a customer or application talks to R2, they talk to the systems we build and operate.

R2 is growing rapidly, and the gateway must evolve to keep pace. The team is responsible for the API surface that handles authentication, request routing, rate limiting, and coordination between clients and R2's storage and metadata layers — all while maintaining strict compatibility with the S3 API and delivering low-latency, highly available access at global scale.

You'll be joining a team that operates at the intersection of large-scale distributed systems, storage infrastructure, and edge computing — building request-path systems that need to be correct, fast, and reliable on every single call.

Responsibilities

Design, implement, and operate the S3-compatible API gateway that serves every R2 operation, ensuring correctness, low latency, and compatibility with the S3 API surface.

Build and operate production services on Cloudflare Workers and Kubernetes that handle high-throughput request traffic with strong availability and durability guarantees.

Own the request path end to end — authentication, authorization, routing, rate limiting, and error handling — and the interfaces between the gateway and R2's storage and metadata layers.

Own projects end to end: from design docs through implementation, testing, deployment, and production monitoring.

Continuously improve the reliability, performance, and observability of the gateway; ramp quickly into unfamiliar and legacy code paths and reduce operational toil.

Participate in on-call rotations, drive incident resolution, and write postmortems that raise reliability standards.

Use AI tools extensively to accelerate development, debugging, and operational tasks. We expect engineers to leverage AI as a core part of their workflow.

Collaborate across teams (storage infrastructure, metadata, networking, other platform teams) to coordinate API contracts, capacity planning, and cross-cutting initiatives.

Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience

Strong programming skills in