Senior Systems Engineer, Workers AI

Available Locations: Austin TX or London UK (Hybrid)

About the role

Youll design and build the core infrastructure that powers AI inference across Cloudflares global network real-time voice frontier open LLMs and customer-deployed models running on a heterogeneous fleet of GPUs and next-generation accelerators in hundreds of cities worldwide. Working alongside AI/ML engineers hardware partners and Cloudflare product teams youll solve hard problems in distributed systems and high-performance computing: sub-second model cold starts multi-accelerator workload scheduling efficient KV cache management and a model deployment platform serving both Cloudflare and customers bringing their own models. Were building an AI inference platform embedded in the fabric of the internet something that doesnt exist yet and this role puts you at the center of it. Were looking for high-agency systems engineers who are energized by foundational infrastructure problems and want to define how AI runs at the edge of the network.

Role Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain core components of the serverless inference platform to ensure high availability and scalability for Cloudflare users.
• Optimize the model scheduling system to significantly increase efficiency and resource utilization across our inference infrastructure.
• Implement improvements to the inference request routing logic to enhance overall performance and reduce latency for end-users.
• Drive significant measurable improvements in the platforms reliability and resilience by identifying and mitigating systemic risks.
• Expand and refine the observability stack including metrics logging and tracing and fine-tune alerts to proactively identify and resolve production issues.
• Lead complex cross-functional technical projects from initial concept and design through final deployment and operationalization.
• Act as a mentor to junior engineers and actively contribute to cultivating a strong collaborative engineering culture within the team.

Role Requirements

Must-Have Skills

• Experience in systems engineering with a focus on distributed high-performance systems.
• Expert proficiency in Rust programming particularly in an asynchronous environment.
• Deep understanding and hands-on experience with relevant networking and application protocols (e.g. TCP HTTP WebSocket).
• Experience with scaling and performance optimization techniques including load balancing and caching in a distributed environment.

Nice-to-Have Skills

• Demonstrable experience with container orchestration platforms specifically Kubernetes and/or Nomad.
• Familiarity with the challenges and architectures involved in large-scale inference serving (e.g. LLM and diffusion models).

What Makes Cloudflare Special

Were not just a highly ambitious large-scale technology company. Were 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 weve equipped more than 2400 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 Cloudflares 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 weve 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. Heres the deal - we dont 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 youd like to be a part of Wed 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.

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