Principal Software Engineer, Data

Cloudflare handles traffic for almost 25% of the Internet. Thats a lot of data. On the Town Lake team our mission is to make that data accessible and valuable for users across the company. We connect data from dozens of source systems and make it available so that any user in the company can answer any question in 5 minutes or less using SQL or plain english.

Were building a modern agentic-first data lakehouse platform based on Trino and Apache Iceberg and all the supporting services for ingestion transformation access control governance dashboarding and agentic access are built on Cloudflares own platform. R2 and R2 Data Catalog for storage Workers and Workers AI for compute Workflows for orchestration Durable Objects and D1 for state Cloudflare Access for authentication.

This is a small but growing team already having an outsized and highly visible impact at the company. If youre looking for an opportunity to make a splash have a foundational say in a new exciting and growing platform and steer the direction on the frontier of data platforms this team might be a good fit for you.

Read more about our platform in the Cloudflare blog ( the Role

We are looking for an experienced product-minded principal software engineer to help take Town Lake from a fast-growing internal platform into the foundational data infrastructure for the entire company.

Youll lead technical architecture and drive implementation for services across our whole stack covering areas such as access control an ingestion framework AI-driven data classification a semantic and governance layer data product/ELT platform a dashboarding and query tool and more.

We are an agentic first team: we leverage AI deeply and comprehensively to accelerate development and make things possible that wouldnt be otherwise and all our tools and services are agentic first for our users and the products they build on top of them.

Town Lake is already used by dozens of teams across Cloudflare including Billing Trust & Safety Developer Platform GTM and Support organizations. This is a high-impact high-visibility role where youll work with critical teams across the company to solve real and interesting problems.

• Define design and execute strategic technical architecture for highly visible highly critical data infrastructure at the company.

• Lead the design and development of tools and infrastructure to improve and scale our data infrastructure at Cloudflare.

• Lead the design and development of data pipelines and data products to serve customers throughout the company including tools to automate delivery of those services.

• Become a subject matter expert across both our data platforms tools and infrastructures as well as our data itself to guide and enable stakeholders with data needs.

• Work across our tech stack which includes Kubernetes Trino Iceberg Clickhouse and PostgreSQL with software built using Go Javascript/Typescript Python and others.

• Mentor and support junior engineers on the team reinforcing a culture of exceptional delivery and accountability on the team.

• 8 years of experience as a software engineer with a focus on designing building and scaling data infrastructure

• Proven experience leading technical initiatives in a cross-functional context working with multiple stakeholders and driving value delivery.

• Extensive experience with data infrastructure at scale including tools like Trino Spark Iceberg/Delta Lake Kafka Clickhouse PostgreSQL

• Experience designing building and debugging data pipelines at scale

• Proficient using backend languages like Go Python Typescript and Rust along with SQL

• Excellent analytical skills with a focus on understanding data and how stakeholders use it to drive value

• Strong communication skills especially around articulating technical concepts for technical and non-technical audiences

• Experience creating and using agentic development workflows and an AI-first mentality

• Experience with data orchestration and infrastructure platforms like Airflow and DBT

• Experience deploying and managing infrastructure in Kubernetes

• Experience with data governance platforms and processes with a focus on privacy and auditability

• Knowledge about machine learning models and MLOps

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!

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 persons 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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