Senior Software Engineer, R2 Metadata

About the role

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. Locations: Austin, TX 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. R2 is Cloudflare's object storage platform, offering developers durable, reliable storage that integrates seamlessly with Cloudflare's global network and Developer Platform. The R2 Metadata team owns the metadata layer that underpins every R2 operation, every object put, get, list, and delete flows through the systems we build and operate. R2 is growing rapidly, and the metadata layer must evolve to keep pace. The team is responsible for designing and operating the metadata systems that track every object in R2, building and shipping developer-facing features, and ensuring the reliability and performance of these systems at global scale. You'll be joining a team that operates at the intersection of distributed databases, large scale storage infrastructure, and edge computing; building systems that need to be correct, fast, and reliable.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement features in a metadata system, backed by a distributed SQL DB, that serves every R2 API operation, ensuring correctness, performance, and compatibility with the S3 API surface.
• Build and operate production services on Cloudflare Workers and Kubernetes that handle high throughput metadata operations with strong consistency and durability guarantees.
• Own the schema, data model, and query patterns for a metadata layer managing billions of objects across multiple distributed database clusters.
• Own projects end to end; from design docs and schema changes through implementation, testing, deployment, and production monitoring.
• Participate in oncall rotations, drive incident resolution, and write postmortems that improve reliability.
• 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, networking, other platform teams) to coordinate capacity planning, API contracts, and cross cutting initiatives.
• Examples of desirable skills, knowledge, and experience
• Strong programming skills in TypeScript, Go, or similar languages.
• Experience with distributed databases; schema design, query optimization, indexing strategies, and understanding consistency/performance tradeoffs at scale.
• Experience building or operating large scale distributed systems with strong reliability requirements.
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure concepts such as object storage, edge computing, or service oriented architectures.
• Understanding of reliability and observability practices: monitoring, alerting, performance tuning, and incident response.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills; ability to explain technical decisions clearly and coordinate across teams.
• Comfortable working with AI coding tools as part of a daily development workflow.
• Experience with Cloudflare Workers, Durable Objects, or edge computing platforms is a strong plus.
• What Makes Cloudflare Special?
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