Principal Systems Engineer, Data

Cloudflare Cloudflare · Enterprise · Austin, TX · Engineering

Cloudflare's Core Data team is seeking an experienced Principal Systems Engineer with deep data expertise to expand, mature, and maintain their centralized data platform. The role involves leading technical architecture and implementation for scaling the data platform, managing access with privacy and security, creating data pipelines and products, and building automation tools. This position will collaborate with various internal teams to enable data-driven decision-making and power internal platforms and customer-facing solutions.

What you'd actually do

  1. Define, design and execute strategic technical architecture for highly visible, highly critical data infrastructure at the company.
  2. Lead the design and development tools and infrastructure to improve and scale our data infrastructure at Cloudflare.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. Work across our tech stack, which includes Kubernetes, Trino, Iceberg, Clickhouse, and PostgreSQL, with software built using Go, Javascript/Typescript, Python, and others.

Skills

Required

  • 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
  • Background 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

Nice to have

  • 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