Systems Engineer - Database Platform

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, New York, San Francisco

About the Team

We manage an internal, multi-region PostgreSQL platform that enables engineers to rapidly build, deploy, and operate services. Our mission is to provide a highly available, stable, and self-service platform with clear operational visibility. As a Systems Engineer, you will collaborate with database engineers, developers, and infrastructure teams to evolve our database architecture and automation. You will be instrumental in scaling our PostgreSQL infrastructure and enhancing database reliability. If you are passionate about PostgreSQL, automation, reliability, and database tooling, let's connect!

Role Responsibilities

• Build, deploy, and manage PostgreSQL database clusters in production environments.
• Develop and maintain database tooling for automation, monitoring and performance tuning.
• Implement high availability, backup and disaster recovery solutions.
• Work closely with Infrastructure and Applications teams to integrate database tools.
• Implement proactive solutions using observability tools to monitor database health.
• Optimize database performance, indexing strategies, and query tuning.

Role Requirements (Must-Have Skills)

Must-Have Skills

• Experience with building, scaling, and managing large-scale multi-tenant PostgreSQL database clusters, encompassing high availability failover, and disaster recovery strategies.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Ansible or Salt) .
• Experience in scripting languages (Python, Bash) for automation.
• Experience building and maintaining database tooling for automation and monitoring.
• Experience with containerization technologies like Docker and Kubernetes.
• Experience optimizing database performance and query tuning.
• Experience with alerting and monitoring tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, and Kibana.

Nice-to-Have Skills

• Experience developing software in Go, Ruby or C/C++
• Contributions to PostgreSQL or relevant open-source projects.
• Expertise in database schema migrations and automation using tools like Flyway, Liquibase or goose.
• Experience with connection pooling solutions such as PgBouncer, HAProxy.
• Experience with non-relational data stores such as Distributed & time-series databases (ex. Cassandra, Timescale) and key-value stores (eg., Redis)

Compensation

Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.

• For Bay Area based hires: Estimated annual salary of $157,000 - $196,000
• For New York based hires: Estimated annual salary of $150,000 - $187,000

Equity

This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan.

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! The below is a description of our benefits for employees in the United States, and benefits may vary for employees based outside the U.S.

Health & Welfare Benefits

• Medical/Rx Insurance
• Vision Insurance
• Flexible Spending Accounts
• Commuter Spending Accounts
• Fertility & Family Forming Benefits
• On-demand mental health support and Employee Assistance Program
• Global Travel Medical Insurance
• Short and Long Term Disability Insurance
• 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan
• Employee Stock Participation Plan

Time Off

• Flexible paid time off covering vacation and sick leave
• Leave programs, including parental, pregnancy health, medical, and bereavement leave

What Makes Cloudflare Special?

We’re not just a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company. We’re a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company with a soul. Fundamental to our mission to help build a better Internet is protecting the free and open Internet.

Project Galileo : Since 2014, we've equipped more than 2,400 journalism and civil society organizations in 111 countries with powerful tools to defend themselves against attacks that would otherwise censor their work, technology already used by Cloudflare’s enterprise customers--at no cost.

Athenian Project : In 2017, we created the Athenian Project to ensure that state and local governments have the highest level of protection and reliability for free, so that their constituents have access to election information and voter registration. Since the project, we've provided services to more than 425 local government election websites in 33 states.

1.1.1.1 : We released 1.1.1.1 to help fix the foundation of the Internet by building a faster, more secure and privacy-centric public DNS resolver. This is available publicly for everyone to use - it is the first consumer-focused service Cloudflare has ever released. Here’s the deal - we don’t store client IP addresses never, ever. We will continue to abide by our privacy commitment and ensure that no user data is sold to advertisers or used to target consumers.

Sound like something you’d like to be a part of? We’d love to hear from you!

Please note that applicants who progress to the offer stage of the interview process may be asked to attend an in-person interview within one of the Cloudflare Offices or Cloudflare Hubs. More details about this will be available at that stage of the interview process.

This position may require access to information protected under U.S. export control laws, including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations. Please note that any offer of employment may be conditioned on your authorization to receive software or technology controlled under these U.S. export laws without sponsorship for an export license.

Cloudflare is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunity for all people and place great value in both diversity and inclusiveness. All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to their, or any other person's, perceived or actual race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, family care status, or any other basis protected by law. We are an AA/Veterans/Disabled Employer.

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