Senior Software Engineer, Cloudflare Queues

About Us
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.
Available Locations: Austin, TX
About the role
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.
The Cloudflare Queues team builds a managed, global message queuing service for developers. Queues allows customers to send, buffer, and reliably deliver messages between Workers with at-least-once delivery, batching, and configurable delivery guarantees, without managing infrastructure or paying bandwidth egress fees. Deeply integrated with Cloudflare Workers, Queues supports event-driven and asynchronous applications across the Developer Platform. Generally available since September 2024, Queues runs at global scale on Cloudflare's edge network and is a foundational building block for event-driven and asynchronous applications.
In this role, you will help design and build Cloudflare Queues, improving reliability, performance, and delivery guarantees while shipping new features at global scale. You will own your work from design through release and contribute across the software stack. This role is AI-first, and you will be expected to use AI tools thoughtfully throughout the development lifecycle without compromising security, reliability, or quality.
Responsibilities

• Design and build Cloudflare Queues as part of Cloudflare's developer platform.
• Maintain and improve a global-scale message queuing service.
• Ship new features and product improvements.
• Improve reliability, performance, and delivery guarantees.
• Own code from inception through release.
• Work across all layers of the software stack.
• Write design documents to propose and communicate solutions.
• Improve message buffering and delivery behavior.
• Improve producer and consumer scalability under load.
• Debug and fix user-facing bugs.
• Use AI tools responsibly throughout development.

Desirable skills, Knowledge & Experience

• 4+ years of experience with distributed systems and data.
• Experience using AI-assisted development tools across the software development lifecycle.
• Strong judgment for when to rely on AI tools and when to validate independently.
• Strong ownership of correctness, security, and quality.
• Willingness to share knowledge and mentor others.
• Excellent oral and written communication skills.
• Ability to document complex ideas clearly and concisely.
• Solid understanding of TypeScript/JavaScript.
• Strong systems-level programming skills.
• Understanding of security issues and responsibilities.
• Experience monitoring, alerting, and debugging high-volume production systems.
• Experience with continuous integration workflows and git.
• Ability to analyze data sets such as logs.
• Experience designing and building APIs.
• Commitment to continuous learning and improvement.

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: Since 2014, we've equipped more than 2,400 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 Cloudflare's 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, we've 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. 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!
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 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 [email protected] or via mail at 101 Townsend St. San Francisco, CA 94107.