Principal Systems Engineer, R2 Storage

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. 

We realize people do not fit into neat boxes. We are looking for curious and empathetic individuals who are committed to developing themselves and learning new skills, and we are ready to help you do that. We cannot complete our mission without building a diverse and inclusive team. We hire the best people based on an evaluation of their potential and support them throughout their time at Cloudflare. Come join us! 

Locations: Austin, TX | New York, NY | San Francisco, CA | 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 Team

R2 is Cloudflare’s object storage platform, designed to offer developers a durable and reliable storage solution that integrates seamlessly with Cloudflare’s Developer Platform, including Workers and other compute products. The R2 team builds foundational infrastructure that operates at massive scale and powers critical workloads across Cloudflare’s global network–designing and maintaining distributed systems that handle high throughput, provide strong consistency and durability guarantees, and support a growing number of developer-facing features.

You’ll be joining a highly motivated team that owns the full stack of R2: tackling complex problems in distributed systems with a focus on reliability and performance at a global scale.

What You’ll Do

• Set the technical direction for some of our most critical and complex infrastructure projects.
• Drive large-scale architectural decisions that span multiple teams and services.
• Design and implement systems that operate reliably under heavy load and at massive scale.
• Lead technical investigations and break down ambiguous problems into clear plans of action.
• Collaborate closely with engineers across teams, product managers, and infrastructure stakeholders to align goals and deliver on timelines.
• Be a key contributor to our roadmap — helping shape the future of R2’s architecture, performance, and reliability.

Examples of desirable skills, knowledge, and experience

• Experience setting the architecture and technical direction for large, cross-team, and cross-functional engineering efforts.
• Strong systems-level programming skills.
• A deep understanding of distributed systems concepts such as consistency, consensus, data replication, and partition tolerance.
• Proven experience building and maintaining high-throughput, low-latency systems.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills; ability to explain technical decisions clearly and drive alignment.
• Comfortable operating in fast-paced environments with tight deadlines and evolving priorities.
• Experience with storage systems, networking, or large-scale cloud infrastructure is a strong plus.

Compensation

Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.

• For New York City, Washington, and California (excluding Bay Area) based hires: Estimated annual salary of $230,000 - $281,000
• For Bay Area-based hires: Estimated annual salary of $234,000 - $286,000

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!  Th