Senior Systems Engineer, Storage

Full Time
Austin, TX, USA
10 months ago
About Us

At Cloudflare, we have our eyes set on an ambitious goal: to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world’s largest networks that powers approximately 25 million 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! 

Position Location: Austin, TX About The Department

An engineering role at Cloudflare provides an opportunity to address some big challenges, at scale. We believe that with our talented team, we can tackle some of the biggest security, reliability and performance problems facing the Internet.

We are searching for storage engineers to make storage fast, resilient and reliable across the many use cases that an application on the internet requires.

Our Engineers come from a variety of technical backgrounds and work across a broad range of environments and codebases. Common qualities across all of our performance-focused engineers include a passion for analysis, optimization, scaling, networking, cross team collaboration and hard problem solving.

What You'll Do

This is a hands-on role in which you will design and code comprehensive block, file and object storage tools, as well as testing frameworks, while taking on a technical leadership role, improving productivity of our engineering teams and bringing standardization to our processes and practices.

You will be responsible for the uptime and reliability of a cloud scale storage solution spanning multiple cities and supporting an ever expanding number of applications. You will build services that can adapt to shifting workload demands to ensure a fast and reliable delivery of a globally distributed storage service..

Communication within your team and across teams is an important aspect of this role. The ideal candidate should be able to succinctly explain capabilities and limitations of the storage system crisply and clearly.

Read more on our blog!

Requisite Skills
  • 8+ years hands-on systems engineering experience
  • Knowledge of Linux Storage IO stack
  • Linux systems knowledge including performance tools and tuning
  • CS fundamentals and comfortable working in multiple languages and codebases
  • Research, analyze, and recommend changes required for system growth
  • Instrumentation of storage management systems
  • Knowledge of redundant storage architecture
  • Distributed storage experience (Ceph or similar)
  • Management and recovery of scaled storage systems
  • Experience with the Linux kernel and Linux software packaging
  • Performance analysis and debugging
  • Configuration management systems such as Saltstack, Chef, Puppet or Ansible
  • Load balancing and reverse proxies such as Nginx, Varnish, HAProxy or Apache
  • SQL databases
  • Time series databases such as OpenTSDB, Graphite, Prometheus or Grafana
  • Key/Value stores
  • Network fundamentals DHCP, ARP, subnetting, routing, firewalls, IPv6
  • Internetworking and BGP
Bonus Points
  • Experience with network programming in C, C++ or Go
  • Experience with continuous / rapid release engineering
  • Strong tooling and automation development experience
  • Experience working in a 24/7/365 service environment
  • Experience with distributed databases / storage system
  • High-bandwidth transit Internetworking and routing experience
Some tools that we use
  • Consul
  • Docker
  • Grafana
  • Kubernetes
  • Nginx
  • Nomad
  • PostgreSQL
  • Prometheus
  • Salt

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: We equip politically and artistically important organizations and journalists 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: We created 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.

Path Forward Partnership: Since 2016, we have partnered with Path Forward, a nonprofit organization, to create 16-week positions for mid-career professionals who want to get back to the workplace after taking time off to care for a child, parent, or loved one.

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!

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.

Cloudflare provides reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities.  Please tell us if you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job. Examples of reasonable accommodations include, but are not limited to, changing the application process, providing documents in an alternate format, using a sign language interpreter, or using specialized equipment.  If you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job, please contact us via e-mail at hr@cloudflare.com or via mail at 101 Townsend St. San Francisco, CA 94107.