Systems Reliability Engineer - Core

Hiring Locations:  

About the Role

We are looking for a Systems Engineer to architect, scale, and operate the distributed infrastructure that powers our global server fleets. You will drive automation and reliability work that keeps our systems fast and resilient at scale.

Responsibilities

Cloudflare is a system spanning the globe, on a mission to make the internet better, safer, and more powerful everyday. With this goal in mind, our product teams are responsible for deployed thousands of deployments at an ever increasing rate.

• As an engineer on one of our Core platform teams, you'll be building the tools to help engineers deploy and operate the services that make Cloudflare work. Our mission is to provide a reliable, yet flexible, platform to help product teams release new software efficiently and safely. You’ll be building the private cloud that Cloudflare developers leverage to build Cloudflare itself. Core platforms we operate at Cloudflare include:

  • Kubernetes

  • Postgres, PgBouncer, and Stolon

  • Kafka

  • Zookeeper

  • Ceph & Rook

  • Developer tools, CI, and CD systems

  • Vault

  • Consul

  • Etcd

  • Temporal

  • Artificial Intelligence & LLMs

You will

• Architect, deploy, and maintain robust distributed systems, focusing on high availability, low latency, and horizontal scalability.

• Optimise Performance: Analyse system bottlenecks, optimise kernel and network stacks, and fine-tune resource utilisation across global server fleets.

• Drive Automation: Build and maintain internal tools and automation frameworks to streamline infrastructure deployment, configuration management, and monitoring.

• Ensure Reliability: Participate in architecture reviews, capacity planning, and proactive system health monitoring to guarantee maximum uptime and resilience.

• Collaborate Cross-Functionally: Partner closely with Security, Network Engineering, and Product teams to integrate infrastructure solutions smoothly across the entire stack.

Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience

• Demonstrable professional experience building and managing large-scale distributed systems or Linux production environments.

• Proficiency in at least one systems programming or scripting language (e.g., Go, Rust, C/C++, Python) with a track record of writing clean, maintainable code.

• Deep understanding of Linux/Unix operating system internals (e.g., storage subsystems, memory management) and core networking protocols (TCP/IP, DNS, BGP).

• Experience with configuration management and infrastructure-as-code tools (e.g., Ansible, Terraform, SaltStack).

• Strong analytical and troubleshooting skills, with a methodical approach to diagnosing complex system-level failures.

Bonus Points

• Experience managing containerised workloads at scale using Kubernetes, Docker, or similar orchestration platforms.

• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and automated testing strategies for infrastructure.

• Contributions to open-source systems software projects or active participation in the broader systems engineering community.

• Experience with any of our existing tooling, such as Kafka and Temporal

• Good experience of harnessing AI to drive robust solutions